VSOG to Mission Elements
What: Long-term experiment schedules will describe the VSOP observing schedule on time scales of weeks up to the full Announcement of Opportunity period, as required. The file will be revised regularly to incorporate new information on the spacecraft orbit, resource availability, and operational efficiency. The long-term experiment schedule may be made available on a restricted access basis to the mission elements.
How: The long-term schedulers will produce a GSTS file for internal VSOG use. Filenames will be of the form 971127JAN98.gst, where where 971127 is the data that the GSTS file was written and DEC97 is the month covered by the file. A modified GSTS, with updated tracking station allocations, will be generated with the naming convention YYMMDD-MMDD-MMDD.gst (e.g. 971128-1205-0111.gst) where YYMMDD is the date the file was generated, and the following MMDDs are the start and end dates of the schedule respectively.
When: The file will be generated before each of the 4 month duration GRT blocks, and as often as required between these times. Modified GSTS files will be generated approximately weekly.
Where: A one-line-per-experiment summary of the long-term schedule will be made available from the VSOP WWW site.