Missions & Plans

Missions and plans are the core organizing concepts in Mission Control.

Missions

A mission is a workspace that groups related satellite operations. It contains plans, deployments, and an activity log.

Creating Missions

Click New Mission from the missions page. Each mission has:

Name — A descriptive label (e.g., “Arctic Monitoring Fleet”, “ISS ML Pipeline”)
Description — Optional context about the mission’s objectives

Activity Feed

Every mission has an activity feed that logs:

Plan creation and updates
Deployment starts and completions
Configuration changes

Plans

A plan is a constraint-aware execution schedule generated by the CAE engine. It maps a workload to a specific satellite’s orbital environment.

Presets vs Custom

Presets are ready-to-use workload definitions:

Preset	Steps	Use Case
On-Board ML Inference	4	Run ML models entirely on-board, downlink only results
Split Learning	9	Bidirectional training across space-ground boundary
Earth Observation QA	8	Capture, quality filter, compress, and downlink imagery
Federated Learning	10	Privacy-preserving distributed training
Store-and-Forward	5	Erasure-coded relay through orbit

Custom workloads let you define your own step DAG:

{
  "name": "My Pipeline",
  "steps": [
    {
      "id": "capture",
      "name": "Sensor Capture",
      "location": "onboard",
      "duration_s": 30,
      "depends_on": [],
      "requires": {
        "power_w": 40,
        "compute": 0.3,
        "thermal_w": 15,
        "memory_mb": 256,
        "storage_mb": 1024
      },
      "output_data_mb": 500
    },
    {
      "id": "process",
      "name": "Ground Processing",
      "location": "ground",
      "duration_s": 60,
      "depends_on": ["capture"],
      "requires": {
        "power_w": 100,
        "compute": 1.0,
        "memory_mb": 2048
      },
      "input_data_mb": 500,
      "output_data_mb": 50
    }
  ]
}

See Custom Workloads for the full schema.

Plan Contents

Every plan includes:

Section	Description
Orbital Environment	Eclipse fraction, ground station passes, available windows
Placement Decisions	Which steps run on-board vs on the ground, with reasoning
Transfer Schedule	Ground station passes used, FEC overhead, data volumes
Error Budget	Worst-case BER, retransmission reserves, delivery confidence
Security Summary	Encryption algorithm, key exchanges, data classification
Execution Timeline	Step-by-step event stream with timestamps
Cost Estimate	Compute and transfer costs in USD

Plan Comparison

When you have multiple plans (different presets, satellites, or configurations), use the Compare feature on the mission page. Select 2-3 plans to see side-by-side metrics: duration, cost, confidence, and data volumes.

Deployments

Deploy a plan to run it. Choose between:

Simulated — Server generates events from the plan’s event timeline. Configurable speed (1x to 10,000x). No agent required.
Live — Creates a pending deployment that an Operator Agent picks up during its next poll cycle.

Track deployment progress in real-time with the event timeline. Events are grouped by phase: placement, compute, transfer, security, and lifecycle.

Status Flow

pending → dispatched → running → completed
                                → failed
         → cancelled

Getting Started

Planning Tools

Orbital Intelligence

CAE

Operator Agent

Mission Control

Orbital Runtime

Orbital Sim

Distributed Compute

SDKs

Resources

Missions & Plans

Missions & Plans

Missions

Creating Missions

Activity Feed

Plans

Presets vs Custom

Plan Contents

Plan Comparison

Deployments

Status Flow

​Missions & Plans

​Missions

​Creating Missions

​Activity Feed

​Plans

​Presets vs Custom

​Plan Contents

​Plan Comparison

​Deployments

​Status Flow

Missions & Plans

Missions

Creating Missions

Activity Feed

Plans

Presets vs Custom

Plan Contents

Plan Comparison

Deployments

Status Flow