Next: The Swift Data Center Up: Operations Previous: Ground Stations Contents
The Mission Operations Center is located at Pennsylvania State University in State College, PA. It operates the Swift satellite and its instruments. The MOC supports pre-launch, launch, early orbit activation, as well as normal and contingency operations. The MOC performs all spacecraft and instrument mission planning, commanding, and monitoring.
Telemetry (Level 0) data from a ground-station contact are sent to the MOC. The MOC processes these data into packets, which are grouped by data type and sorted by time, and then makes them available to the Swift Data Center.
The MOC also has the ability to upload rapid response instructions to Swift. These allow follow-up observations of new GRBs detected by the on-board FoM software, and ToO inputs from the science team or the science community.