Plug and Play Mission Operations

Ongoing and planned smallsat programs within NASA, the DoD, and academia have indicated a need to be able to routinely and efficiently operate multiple small spacecraft in support of science and technology missions. However, as the number of these missions is expected to grow rapidly, the associated costs to develop and operate unique ground control stations, tools, and networks may become prohibitive to the sponsoring organizations or universities. In order to inform and raise the awareness of the smallsat space operations community, the University of Hawai'i, NASA Ames Research Center, San Jose State University (SJSU) and American Institure of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) held a workshop entitled Plug `n' Play Mission Operations (PPMO) which held May 16-17, 2011 at the SJSU campus in San Jose, California. The purpose of the workshop was to foster collaboration and leveraging of existing and developing capabilities that may be collectively utilized by the smallsat community for space operations. Although the emphasis of the workshop was on small satellites, many of the techniques discussed would be applicable to large spacecraft mission operations as well. The workshop explored the adoption of standards and existing capabilities as well as the creation of new technologies that will enable space mission developers to plan, design, and operate their spacecraft using a common architecture in order to reduce cost and overall mission risk. The PPMO workshop investigated the various needs of the smallsat communities (military, civil and educational space) and also touched on existing systems and capabilities (such as GSFC's GMSEC, JPL's AMMOS, and NRL's CGA used in the MC3 program) and those under development (such as HSFL's COSMOS and ESA's GENSO). The workshop also held facilitated discussions organized into categories along the lines of Approaches (programmatic and related issues), Implementation (technical solutions and architectures), and Applications (concept of operations, mission types and users). This paper presents the results of this workshop and the path forward.