What’s the problem with today’s ground systems?
The answer is they are all special snowflakes!
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they are unique,
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there is too much variability,
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too many bespoke solutions,
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not enough common or shared components and
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they rely on specialized (ie expensive) labor to keep them running
This leads to outdated ground systems that are expensive to maintain during operations and the extended mission phase.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s
Space Science Mission Operations solution is the
Virtualized Multi-Mission Operations Center (vMMOC)
It’s an on-prem private/hybrid cloud solution with a shared ops &
engineering staff and common services that are shared across missions
with a common security plan.
It has driven costs down for tenants by 40% over the last 6 years.
The vMMOC is an excellent solution for existing missions but what about future missions?
Future Missions
Future missions must be reliable, flexible to meet varying mission needs, long lived as some mission last decades, and cost efficient to operate.
Implied mission needs include modularity, adaptability, portable and scalable.
Our Solution
A bit about Security
Our solution is based on a philosophy of simplicity, open standards, open-source products, and cloud native components and services.
We must be cognizant of accidental complexity in our design choices since this can lead to higher costs of ownership. Insisting on public, open standards such as CCSDS and XTCE are essential to modularity.
Adopting open-source tools are the keys to longevity and inherent to portability and prevent vendor lock-in. Cloud native solutions offer fault tolerance, and provide scale with elasticity.
While many people view Security as a requirement, we view it as a discipline. Our solution is completely portable and vendor agnostic and it can run in any environment from your on-prem data center to a public cloud to a FISMA High private cloud.
Let's get to the details...
Our solution has three layers...
Mission Applications
The application layer consists of T&C, Mission planning and scheduling, trending analysis, situational awareness, simulation and science operations. We’re working across multiple NASA centers on a common open-source T&C system. We are working extensively with JPL’s AMMOS group to bring their Aerie mission planning tool to wide-spread use across the agency. Applications are tied together by a business process-based automation engine based on open standards.
Control Plane
Data Mesh
The control plane defines the state we want the system to be at any point in time. Kubernetes is at the core of this foundation but it also includes self-healing nodes, workload management, configuration management all defined as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).
The other foundational element is what we call the data mesh. The data mesh enables communication and data sharing across the environment without moving files from one place to another. Our philosophy is that the data is the interface between applications. All data within the system is either part of a persistent stream or an object store and all applications should point to or integrate with the data streams and not with each other. The key to making this work is a common standard and we’ve chosen Apache’s Iceberg format. It provides schema evolution and there are several open-source tools for visualization and exploration on Iceberg datasets. We’ve also included an event model across applications that can be shared with outside users so data can remain in its home repository and traversed based on events.
Here's how it looks...
