Speaker
Description
Metis is the coronagraph of the scientific payload of Solar Orbiter, an ESA-NASA mission which aims to study the circumsolar region and the Sun poles. Metis data and operations are managed via the Metis Operations Facility (MOF), which is built, executed and maintained by ALTEC in collaboration with INAF, funded by Italian Space Agency. The collection of functionalities and subsystems within the MOF allows both the industrial and scientific teams to plan the instrument observations, validate the observation command sequences, process the data to generate higher level data products, and finally make them available both to end-users and ESA Solar Orbiter Archive (SOAR).
Since its first deployment in 2022, 6 major versions of MOF have been released, together with an incremental expansion of the computational resources that are needed to best meet the instrument demands. The current MOF environment includes 15 virtual nodes, for a total of 96 CPU cores, about 400GB RAM and tens of TB of data storage, that can be expanded on-demand if needed.
The MOF can be divided into 5 subsystems: Data Processing, Mission Database, TM/TC Monitoring, Observation Planning (which contains the Metis Reference Model - MRM) and Infrastructure.
The Data Processing S/S runs the pipelines for the telemetry transformation and enrichment, in order to generate higher level data products up to L3. It interacts with other components of the MOF and with MOC for direct telemetry download via EDDS. The Mission Database S/S stores all the Metis telemetry and data products (including auxiliary, calibration and planning data products), and provides a set of functions to enrich product metadata during ingestion. It also makes them accessible to the scientific team via GUI or REST API. The TM/TC Monitoring is the subsystem responsible for monitoring the telemetry incoming from Metis and, partially, from the spacecraft. It is based on the ESA SCOS-2000 suite. The Observation Planning S/S integrates the MISO software (Multi Instrument Sequence Organizer) developed for creating the Command Request Files (CRF) to be delivered to the Metis Reference Model (the electronic model which provides a test bench for the generated CRF, used to validate TC sequences in IOR) and to MOC.
The MOF interfaces with several external entities: the Mission Operation Centre (MOC) at ESOC, which distributes telemetry packets and receives planned TC sequences; the Science Operations Centre (SOC) at ESAC, from which planning and auxiliary data are retrieved; the ESA SOAR, where data products of level 2 and 3 (including low-latency data) are stored for permanent archival and dissemination; the SSDC at ASI, the Italian Space Science Data Center, hosted at ASI.
In 2025, the MOF was upgraded to v6; it runs on a new and efficient infrastructure (VAMOS), and the most recent updates concerned the activation of automatic procedures to support the efficient reprocessing of data belonging to whole LTPs. This approach will be exploited to support the scientific team in the preparation of the upcoming Metis Data Release 2.
In the talk, the MOF activities and architecture will be presented in detail, as well as the interfaces with external facilities. The current state and the execution of daily and cyclic operations will be discussed, together with future perspectives.
