LASP: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Part of the duties of LASP's Mission Operations Division is to plan and schedule the daily operations of the satellites and their instrument suites. This is accomplished by a highly trained team of people and various software products.

To begin, the planning and scheduling team gathers experiment requests from LASP and NASA scientists and the ground station schedules.
This information and any orbital parameters are ingested into LASP's automatic scheduler, OASIS-PS (Operations and Science Instrument Support - Planning and Scheduling).
OASIS-PS and other tools are used to create the schedule for the spacecraft and instruments into uploadable files.
These files are then uploaded to the satellites via ground stations.

Ground Stations and Tracking Satellites Used by LASP
LASP uses a world-wide network of sophisticated ground antennas and satellites to relay signals between the Mission Operations Center and the spacecraft we control.	Ground stations with 5 to 13 m antennas for communicating with low earth orbiting spacecraft Tracking and data relay satellites in geosynchronous orbit 35,800 km above earth Deep space stations with 34 m and 70 m ground antennas for communicating with spacecraft far from earth

NASA Tracking and Data Relay Satellite

NASA 70 meter Deep Space Station
(Compare the antenna’s size to the truck at bottom)