Solar Orbiter Observing Plans for Understanding the Physics of Solar Energetic Particles: Definition and Simulation

Solar Orbiter is a European Space Agency mission dedicated to Solar and Heliospheric Physics, currently planned for launch in February 2019. Due to its telemetry limitation, the mission planning should be carefully done to maximize scientific return. This work defines and simulates the scientific plan to address all sub-objectives under general Objective 3 of the Solar Orbiter mission: 'how do solar eruptions produce energetic particle radiation that fills the heliosphere?' Five new complete Solar Orbiter Observing Plans (SOOPs), for coordinating operations from several (up to 10) instruments, are defined. The SOOPs are scheduled in the Medium-Term Periods (MTPs) within the Science Activity Plan of the full mission, following specific planning strategies, which consider telemetry downlink rates and specific Sun-Earth-S/C configurations. The MTPs are coded and simulated to check when the instruments will be switched on and off and what the resource usage will be, in terms of power and telemetry generation, against the mission's constraints. Before running the code in Experiment Planning Software (EPS), the Objective 3 SOOP timelines are checked with Sous-Chef, a visualization tool for individual instrument observations and SOOPs. The results obtained prove that the process fully addresses Solar Orbiter Objective 3 and it is valid for planning and simulation. It could also be easily adapted to suit other needs in the future, like different trajectories or scientific alternatives, in order to have the best output for science and operations.