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Mission Control Technologies: A New Way of Designing and Evolving Mission SystemsCurrent mission operations systems are built as a collection of monolithic software applications. Each application serves the needs of a specific user base associated with a discipline or functional role. Built to accomplish specific tasks, each application embodies specialized functional knowledge and has its own data storage, data models, programmatic interfaces, user interfaces, and customized business logic. In effect, each application creates its own walled-off environment. While individual applications are sometimes reused across multiple missions, it is expensive and time consuming to maintain these systems, and both costly and risky to upgrade them in the light of new requirements or modify them for new purposes. It is even more expensive to achieve new integrated activities across a set of monolithic applications. These problems impact the lifecycle cost (especially design, development, testing, training, maintenance, and integration) of each new mission operations system. They also inhibit system innovation and evolution. This in turn hinders NASA's ability to adopt new operations paradigms, including increasingly automated space systems, such as autonomous rovers, autonomous onboard crew systems, and integrated control of human and robotic missions. Hence, in order to achieve NASA's vision affordably and reliably, we need to consider and mature new ways to build mission control systems that overcome the problems inherent in systems of monolithic applications. The keys to the solution are modularity and interoperability. Modularity will increase extensibility (evolution), reusability, and maintainability. Interoperability will enable composition of larger systems out of smaller parts, and enable the construction of new integrated activities that tie together, at a deep level, the capabilities of many of the components. Modularity and interoperability together contribute to flexibility. The Mission Control Technologies (MCT) Project, a collaboration of multiple NASA Centers, led by NASA Ames Research Center, is building a framework to enable software to be assembled from flexible collections of components and services.
Document ID
20060051848
Acquisition Source
Ames Research Center
Document Type
Preprint (Draft being sent to journal)
Authors
Trimble, Jay (NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Walton, Joan (NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Saddler, Harry (QSS Group, Inc. Moffett Field, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
August 23, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2006
Subject Category
Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence And Robotics
Meeting Information
Meeting: AIAA Spaceops 2006
Location: Rome
Country: Italy
Start Date: June 19, 2006
End Date: June 23, 2006
Sponsors: American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.

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