Efficiency of Operations, maintaining “System Integrity”, and “Service Availability”
The main Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for efficient satellite operations should ensure at all times the fleet integrity and safety, service continuity without mission interruptions, minimizing lead-time of associated operations, and last – but not least –maintaining customer satisfaction through meeting customer expectations, and minimizing the associated response time.
For the successful achievement of the above stated targets, and ensuring sustainability of satellite operations, the team had pre-defined and operate through a set of common practices summarized hereunder:
• Identify, and prioritize operational risks: All performed operations are itemized and categorized based on their likelihood and potential impact, and determine a so called “Risk-Matrix”. This “Risk Matrix” pre-define the best course of action and its associated procedures, leading to minimize the response time both during routines operations and contingencies situations.
• Operation Planning and Analysis: Long-term and short-term operation Planning, for all fleet nominal periodic activities including orbital corrections, equipment’s maintenance, and system seasonal management, etc. Moreover, continuous mission analysis performed to check the fleet collocation safety, orbit evolution, satellite mass consumption and lifetime estimation.
• Team Meetings: A periodic and dedicated operational meeting, are performed for exchange and smooth flow of information between the operation team, and various engineering departments, as well as to prepare in-advance the team for coming seasonal activities.
• Documentations Issue: Various sets of in-house documentations are issued on a regular basis to keep track of the health of Nilesat satellite systems and subsystems, as well as to record the different conducted operations, recommendations and technical notes.• Training and Procedure Validation: Long-term planning for periodic practical training on the ground simulators on all possible contingency scenarios, to provide an efficient team performance, as well as training new team members to be able to perform their requested activities in a well-known manner.
• Cooperation with Manufacturers, and International Organizations: Collaboration
with manufacturers, ensures knowledge transfer for any technical updates/recommendations in both the ground station and the spacecraft. On the
other hand, interacting with international organizations such as NASA/JSPOC, and Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), ensures keeping fleet safety against orbital debris, and awareness for best Practices on post-mission disposal and passivation activities.
In summary, respecting the routine schedule of various operations, securing team readiness and information flow between team members, maintaining strong relations with the spacecraft manufacturer, relevant international organizations, all this would ensure the overall operational goals through maintaining “efficiency of operations”, that assure both “System Integrity”, and the required “Service availability”, for Nilesat fleet that has been the case during the past 28 years of operations since our first satellite launch on 1998.
Author: Dr. Eng. / Mohamed AbdElGhany
Missions and Operation Director
The Egyptian Satellite Company – NILESAT
