Mission Planning Around Delay Tolerant Networking Constraints

DSN antenna passes are pre-allocated weeks in advance and DTN bundle delivery windows are measured in minutes, not continuous streams. EchoQuilt's mission planner schedules quilt bundle delivery to fit within these hard DTN contact constraints.

A lunar analog campaign generated 220 GB of passive acoustic data across a 12-sol push at Kilauea but had only 180 minutes of simulated relay contact per sol to deliver the resulting quilt back to Earth. The team discovered on sol 6 that roughly 70% of the quilt data they were generating could not fit inside the scheduled DSN-analog passes, which meant critical patches would not reach analysts until days after they were collected. The decision tree of which patches to ship, which to defer, and which to compress had no formal representation in the mission plan. The science lead ended up making ad hoc calls during each pass, and two of those calls deferred patches that turned out to be the highest-value data of the campaign.