Day to Day Practices to Enhance Operations Reliability for Magnetospheric Multiscale

The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is a major NASA effort to better understand the behavior of Earth's magnetosphere. MMS consists of a cluster of four satellites with many instruments including several high voltage instruments. The day to day operations plan must account for instrument safety concerns, formation maneuvers to maintain high quality data collection while at the same time maintaining fleet safety, data collection management to optimize the potential for high quality data acquisition, and data file management to bring down the maximum amount of high quality data within the MMS downlink allocation. Development of the daily fleet Absolute Time Sequence (ATS) is critical to safe and reliable operations, requiring a high degree of coordination between the Mission Operations Center, Science Operations Center (SOC), and instrument teams. Instruments have unique requirements and the SOC has developed tools and techniques to accomplish reliable generation of the ATS on a weekly basis. The SOC also manages the commanding of file downlink on behalf of the MMS Science Data Center with a highly reliable process. We describe our experiences in working to improve reliability for MMS operations.