Virtural operations center for space science

The Virtual Operations Center (VOC) concept comes from the development of the mission operations center for The Strategic Pioneer Program on Space Science (SPPSS) and is proposed in this article. It focuses on human operations of satellites used for science research. The end users for this type of satellite are the scientists in specific fields. They decide the activities of the satellite and use the data produced by it. They are usually familiar with and focus on specific scientific goals; however, they do not care about the complex operational processes. Unfortunately, they cannot avoid being involved. The purpose of VOC is to make the complex operational processes transparent to the scientists. VOC provides a user-friendly interface to set the scientific goals and automatic planning and scheduling tools for executing the satellite plan. In a short time, scientists can get real time visualized scenes of the satellite and get the preliminarily processed experiment result data and adequate information about what the satellite has done. The article first presents layout of typical VOC, and then, the advantages of VOC are analysed. Next, we take the Dark Matter Particle Explorer satellite as an example to show scientist how to work with VOC. Finally, we share the lessons learned related to VOC.