System Description

The next generation small satellite mission operations system includes a hardware bus architecture which, much like today's desktop workstations, would allow multiple processors, multiple peripherals, and payloads conforming to industry standard bus interfaces to be quickly integrated for a given mission. This hardware scalability is key to the software required to support the mission operations concept presented here. Such a bus architecture will enable redundancy and scalability, which will accommodate variations in subsystem and payload processing requirements., and will allow the addition of computing power as needed to enable much more onboard processing than is typical of traditional spacecraft computing systems.

The software system architecture proposed enables distribution of functions within the ground computing environment and between the space and ground sements of the overall computing environment. The major systems software functions within this end-to-end distributed computing environment include:

1. Real-time operating system with an extensible and configurable kernel.
2. Digital signal based behavioral and model deviation based fault detection.
3. Rule-based command and control for linking event detection to automated reactions.
4. Automatic planning system with "anytime" algorithms.
5. Internetworking between space segment and ground segment computers.
6. Transparent software and/or hardware based security protocols.
7. Development environment for simulations and mixed hardware/software testbedding with the ability to simulate faults.
8. Distributed ground and embedded system data management schema.