DTL/DML based Mission Control System (MCS) Demonstrator

In the GSTP activity "Advanced Monitoring Extension", as part of the advanced monitoring for a modern generic Mission Control System (MCS), generic libraries covering the management and transfer of TM/TC data are being developed. These libraries have been designed such to be usable within all ground data system applications i.e. without introducing any specific assumption about the nature/purpose of the application nor about its run-time environment. This approach constitutes a significant change of the existing implementations of ground data systems which are all based on targeted specific implementations (with a significant amount of duplications...). The suitability of these libraries for adoption within operational systems needs to be demonstrated. This is the purpose of the new proposed activity.

The objective of this new activity is to verify the new EGOS (ESA Ground Operations S/W) libraries, namely DTL (Data Transfer Library) and DML (Data Management Library), within a mission control system.

In addition, the telemetry reception and distribution chain of SCOS-2000 will be re-engineered adopting these libraries.

The main benefits for ESA of developing this new architecture is that the new server components, based on the EGOS architecture, will not be depending on the SCOS-2000 libraries. This allows the usage of the server components not only within a mission control system but also within other components of the ground segment. In addition, a more flexible concept for cascading data distributors will be implemented. The specific distribution concept implemented by the centralised packet distributor server and the client packet distributor (CPD) will be replaced by a generic distributor implementation. It will also include SCOS-2000 client applications that can operate with the new EGOS servers.

It is expected that the new architecture developed in this activity will bring increased flexibility. It allows to use the telemetry chain, both inside of SCOS-2000 and outside of SCOS-2000 on all locations in the ground segment where the EGOS infrastructure is present. It will in any case increase the flexibility for distributing telemetry data in the ground segment. In particular, the following applications will be affected/delivered: Telemetry Receiver and Packetiser; Telemetry Live Data Distributor; Telemetry Archive Reader/Writer APIs, compatible to the existing SCOS-2000 applications supporting the management of archived data; and Telemetry Packet Client Reception Library.

Finally, the new telemetry chain will be compared against the existing SCOS-2000 telemetry chain regarding performance and maintainability. The end-to-end test of the telemetry chain will be performed with the automated testing framework "ART" (Automated Regression Testing).

Project lenght: 2007 - 2009

ANF-DATA funded by CZ PECS Programme: 250.000 €