Within the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme of ESA, it is foreseen to deploy several robotic telescopes to provide surveillance and tracking services for man-made as well as natural near-Earth objects (NEOs). The Test-Bed Telescope (TBT) project will procure a validation platform for an autonomous optical observing system in a realistic scenario, consisting of two telescopes located in Spain and Australia, to collect representative test data for precursor SSA services. 

In this context, the TBT scheduler consists of two modules that will allow the autonomous planning of the night, performed by the ISDEFE scheduler, and the control of the real-time response of the system, done by the RTS2 internal scheduler.  The ISDEFE scheduler allocates tasks for both telescopes without human intervention. Every night it takes all the inputs needed and prepares the schedule following some predefined rules. The main purpose of the scheduler is the distribution of the time for recently discovered NEOs and space debris follow-ups and surveys. The schedule considers the overall performance of the system, and combine follow-up with apriori survey strategies for both kind of objects.

The strategy is defined according to the expected combined performance for both systems the upcoming night (weather, sky brightness, object accessibility and priority) and the time allocated for the two main tasks (NEO follow-up and space-debris catalog updating). Therefore ISDEFE scheduler defines the global approach for the network and relies on the RTS2 internal scheduler for the final detailed distribution of tasks at each sensor.