Over the past fifteen years, Goddard Space Flight Center has developed several successful science missions in-house: the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE), the Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) [1], and the Space Technology 5 (ST-5) [2] missions, several Small Explorers, and several balloon missions. Currently in development are the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) [3] and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) [4]. What is not well known is that these missions have been supported during spacecraft and/or instrument integration and test, flight software development, and mission operations by two in house satellite Telemetry and Command (T&C) systems, the Integrated Test and Operations System (ITOS) and the Advanced Spacecraft Integration and System Test (ASIST). The advantages of an in-house satellite Telemetry and Command system are primarily in the flexibility of management and maintenance - the developers are considered a part of the mission team, get involved early in the development process of the spacecraft and mission operations control center, and provide on-site, on-call support that goes beyond Help Desk and simple software fixes. On the other hand, care must be taken to ensure that the system remains generic enough for cost effective re-use from one mission to the next. The software is designed such that many features are user-configurable. Where user-configurable options were impractical, features were designed so as to be easy for the development team to modify.
Proven and Robust Ground Support Systems - GSFC Success and Lessons Learned
2008-03-01
351797 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English