Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (USA)1 NASA GSFC/ASRC (USA) 2
Date: September 29, 11:15 - 11:45 Room: Sala 3M
The XML Telemetric and Command Exchange (XTCE) standard provides a way to describe space mission telemetry and command “databases” (or dictionaries) to be exchanged across centers and space agencies. Having a standard format for describing the telemetry and command formats allows for the development or adoption of compatible tools and significantly reduces the amount of custom software development often needed to ensure all system components have access to consistent format definitions. XTCE usage has the potential to lead to consolidation of the Mission Operations Center (MOC) Monitor and Control development costs for mission cross-support, reduced equipment and configuration costs, as well as a decrease in the turnaround time for telemetry and command modifications during all the mission phases. The main objective of this paper is to show how powerful XTCE is in terms of interoperability across organizations. This paper summarizes work which entailed converting the mission telemetry database for a current NASA mission, in XTCE format, into several target mission operation databases associated with different telemetry and command toolchains, and then comparing the results of the telemetry processing and display. The target toolchains selected were Ball Aerospace’s COSMOS, NASA GSFC ITOS and NASA JPL AMPCS – all real-time telemetry and command processing systems.