Fulfilling NASA's new vision for space exploration requires the development of sustainable, flexible and fault tolerant spacecraft control systems. The traditional development paradigm consists of the purchase or fabrication of hardware boards with fixed processor and/or Digital Signal Processing (DSP) components interconnected via a standardized bus system. This is foliowed by the purchase and/or development of software.
Project Constellation implements NASA's vision for space exploration to expand human presence in our solar system. The engineering focus of this project is developing a system of systems architecture. This architecture allows for the incremental development of the overall program. Systems can be built and connected in a "Lego style" manner to generate configurations supporting various mission objectives.The-develepment of the avionics or control . .-------systems-of such a massive-project-will result in--concurrent engineering. Also, each system will have software and the need to communicate with other (possibly heterogeneous) systems. Fortunately, this design problem has already been solved during the creation and evolution of systems such as the Internet and the Department of Defense's successful effort to standardize distributed simulation (now IEEE 1516). The solution relies on the use of a standard layered software framework and a communication protocol.A standard framework and communication protocol is suggested for the development and maintenance of Project Constellation systems. The ARINC 653 standard is a great start for such a common software framework. This paper proposes a common system software framework that uses the Real Time Publish/Subscribe protocol for framework-to-framework communication to extend ARINC 653.It is highly recommended that such a framework be established before development. This is important for the success of concurrent engineering. The framework provides an infrastructure for general system services and is designed for flexibility to support a spiral development effort.
As the space shuttle program celebrates its 20" anniversary of human space flight, work is underway to develop a major Cockpit Avionics Upgrade (CAU) for the U.S. Space Shuttle orbiter fleet. The Command and Display Processing Subsystem (CDPS) represents the third generation of display avionics for the orbiters and builds upon the Multifunction Electronic Display Subsystem (MEDS) or "glass cockpit" already installed onboard Atlantis and Columbia and scheduled for installation on the rest of the fleet. United Space Alliance is heading the upgrade project as part of its space flight operations contract with NASA. With the goal of first flight in 2006, this upgrade is an important aspect of the "Shuttle of the Future" program, which aims to upgrade vehicle safety and enable the current shuttle orbiter fleet to keep flying for another 15-20 years.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.