Mars Express thermal power dataset

This dataset contains several features related to the power resources and general situation of ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. Its purpose is the design of predictive models related to thermal power consumption. Having an efficient planning on the allocation of power is critical, as it allows to maximize the scientific gain and extend the life-time of the overall mission.

The data has been split into two sets:

MEX1 containing 5795 orbits from 01.01.2015 to 18.08.2019

MEX2 containing 1507 orbits from 08.08.2019 to 31.10.2020

MEX1 can be seen as a training set. It was used to fit a reference model (THP 2.0 - Thermal Power Model) which is available in the thp2 column. MEX2 can be seen as a test set, providing previously unseen orbits.

All the features are aggregated for each full orbit of the spacecraft. They include:

timestamp: time [unix timestamp]

sme: the value of Sun-Mars-Earth angle [deg]

s_m_distance: Sun-Mars distance in [km]

orbital_p: length of orbital period [s]

average_power: measured average power consumption [W]

right_flag: Guidance flag, North/South flag, determines whether LVA is exposed to sun, 1 = yes, 0 = no 

eclipse_l: length of the eclipse in orbit [s]

full_off: whether full off or drive off, full off = 1, only drive off = 0

average_xtx: average current drawn by transmitter component [A] (multiply by 28V to get W)

gsep_dur: time spent in GSEP [s]

lvah: Heating of the LVA (launch vehicle adapter) [combined feature]

sh: Solar heating [combined feature]

thp2: output of the reference model THP2 model [W]

lvah is a heating related to the orientation of the spacecraft and is computed by 

\(LVAH = SME \cdot \text{right_flag} \)

sh is another aggregated feature representing the total solar power influx. It is computed by:

\(SH = \left( 1 - \frac{\text{eclipse_d}}{\text{orbital_p}}\right) \frac{3.846 \cdot 10^{26} W}{4 \cdot \pi \cdot (\text{s_m_distance} \cdot 1000)^2} \)

average_power is the target of prediction and thus of interest to estimate from other parameters.

thp2 provides a reference model that has been developed by ESA engineers to predict average_power.