The constellation tasking system supports 1-Day, 3-Day, 7-Day and Background tasking tiers to give the user additional control of new acquisition collect timeframe and tasking request priority.
When a new acquisition tasking request is submitted, the user is required to select a Window Open and a Tasking Tier. By default, the constellation tasking system will attempt to schedule the new acquisition for the timeframe period of the selected Tasking Tier following the Window Open start date. For example, if a tasking request is submitted with a Window Open of January 1st and a 3-day Tasking Tier new acquisition collect opportunities from January 1st through January 4th will be evaluated by the scheduler.
For additional flexibility, a user has the option to set Window Close to a period longer than the Tasking Tier period, for cases where they would prefer data acquisition within a certain Tasking Tier period, but would also accept data collected outside of that period. The user is charged for the original tasking tier as that is the property that determines acquisition priority by the scheduler. It is not possible to set the Window Close for a shorter period than the selected Tasking Tier.
The Background Tasking Tier can be thought of as an opportunistic tasking request. Tasks will only be collected when there is capacity available. The Background Tasking Tier is the only type of tasking request that can be bumped from the schedule. It is possible that a Background task will get added to the schedule and more frequently shuffled, or fully removed, if a higher priority tasking request (Routine, 1-Day, 3-Day, 7-Day) needs the imaging slot.