Hypercubes for Critical Space Flight Command Operations

Abstract

Controlling interplanetary spacecraft and planning their activities, as currently practiced, requires massive amounts of computer time and personnel. To improve this situation, it is desired to use advanced computing to speed up and automate the commanding process. Several design and prototype efforts have been underway at JPL to understand the appropriate roles for concurrent processors in future interplanetary spacecraft operations. Here we report on an effort to identify likely candidates for parallelism among existing software systems that both generate commands to be sent to the spacecraft and simulate what the spacecraft will do with these commands when it receives them. We also describe promising results from efforts to create parallel prototypes of representative portions of these software systems on the JPL/Caltech Mark 111 hypercube.