Burley R. J., J. L. Green, and R. J. Pages, Science and Mission
Control Center for the IMAGE Mission, presented at the 2nd
International Symposium on Reducing the cost of Spacecraft Ground
Systems and Operations, Oxford, UK, July 21-23, 1997.

Science and Mission Control Center for the IMAGE mission

R. J. Burley, J. L. Green, and R. J. Pages, NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771)

     The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE)
mission is the first NASA mission in a series of mid-sized explorers
(MIDEX).  All seven of the IMAGE instruments will be used to study the
global response of the magnetosphere to changes in the solar wind in
new and unique ways.  The mission will utilize neutral atom,
ultraviolet, and radio imaging techniques. IMAGE is currently planned
for launch in January 2000. 
     In order to drive the design of new spacecraft and ground systems
towards lower operations costs, the MIDEX flight series required a
fixed mission operations and data analysis (MO&DA) budget for the life
of the mission.  The total MO&DA budget for IMAGE is not to exceed $15
million US dollars. This fixed budget has provided the impetus to
re-examine, and to change, the existing mission operations paradigm at
the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).   
     To keep within the cost cap of operating the IMAGE mission for
three years the IMAGE project is pioneering a new mission and science
operations concept for NASA. This concept involves a number of
important elements such as: 
* The consolidation of the traditionally separated science and mission
operations centers into a single facility called the SMOC (Science and
Mission Operations Center).  The SMOC approach also has the desired
effects of consolidating the operations staff and of minimizing the
number of interfaces within the system.
* The consolidation of personnel from across Goddard into a single
combined development team.  This activity is both preceding, and to
some extent driving, the current restructuring of the Goddard Space
Flight Center.
* Adoption of industry standards for all data communication.
* Reducing the size of the Spacecraft Control Team, through increased
use of expert systems for spacecraft and instrument health and safety
monitoring.  The expert system will use a C-Language Integrated
Production System (CLIPS) rules base to monitor spacecraft and
instrument health and safety telemetry as it is received in the SMOC,
and will page the on-call member(s) of the operations staff when a
hazardous condition has been detected, or if the telemetry has not
been received when expected.
* Implement a base line design for the ground system that is for
unattended operation.  Previously at Goddard, the design of the ground
system has usually been driven by LEOP (Launch and Early Orbit Phase)
requirements, instead of autonomous nominal operations.
* Selection of a telemetry processing and commanding system that can
fulfill both mission operations and payload integration and test phase
functions, eliminating the necessity to translate and re-test the
project database between mission development phases.
* Integration of Level-Zero and Level-One science data processing into
a single automated data pipeline.  This includes the automated
initiation of science data processing after a pass has been completed
and automated forwarding of all products to a publicly accessible
web-server for immediate availability and distribution.
* Adoption of a public domain data standard for Level One data
products, for which a wide suite of support software already exists. 
This standard is the Common Data Format (CDF), and is the standard
used for the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) Key
Parameters.
* The data policy of the mission is that all data is immediately
available to the public.  No proprietary data rights or periods exist
for the mission.  This policy eliminates any requirements for the
intermediate archiving of any data products.  All products will be
immediately forwarded to the National Space Science Data Center
(NSSDC), the ultimate repository for the data, for immediate
distribution.
* Use of the new Automated Real-Time Navigation System (ARTSN)
capability at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Use of this capability
will free the Science and Mission Operations Center from the
requirement to transmit target acquisition data to the Deep Space
Network prior to a pass.
* Spacecraft design has large power, thermal, and data budget margins,
making the spacecraft itself more robust and autonomous.
     These and other new approaches to the low cost IMAGE ground
system will be discussed. 
     As implemented by the IMAGE project, the move away from the
traditional ground systems developed at GSFC will both greatly reduce
operations costs, and, greatly reduce development costs for the IMAGE
mission and for other spacecraft in the MIDEX mission series.