Planning, operations and data handling of planetary science missions

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Física

Since the dawn of human kind the celestial sphere has had a special place in our imagination. I always felt the same passion for the cosmos. In particular, fuelled by the journeys of discovery of the Solar System, I always dreamed of dedicating myself to planetary exploration. To follow that idea I studied physics and, in 1999, I finally got the opportunity to work in Planetary Science research. It all started in the Lisbon Observatory, where I was able to analyse infrared data from the Jupiter orbiter, Galileo, collected by its Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS). At this stage I learned some methods used in data analysis. I continued my career in the European Space Agency in the Science Planning of the SMART-1 lunar spacecraft. I remained in this mission for the following seven years, and saw my responsibilities grow. I started by giving technical support to the Project Scientist. By the end of the mission I had been a major player in the setup of the planning system, and worked in all capacities within the SMART-1 Science and Technology Operations Centre, and the Advanced Moon Micro-Imager Experiment (AMIE). Finally, in 2006, I started working in the Venus Express project as a Liaison Scientist for the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) instrument. I was able to re-work the VMC planning system with the Principal Investigator in order to gather more valuable science data. While this optimization was done, and since the spacecraft was already orbiting Venus, my duties also included, and still do, to plan and operate the VMC camera. During my entire career I have had two side projects running along my main tasks. I always had an interest for innovation and some of my ideas developed to integral parts of my main projects. I also always kept an interest in data analysis, as time permitted, that I carried with NIMS, AMIE and VMC.