Migrating the XMM-Newton & Integral Ground Segment
Norbert Pfeil, Marcus G. F. Kirsch · SpaceOps 2014 Conference · 2014
ESA’s X-ray and γ-ray observatories XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL are real-time missions, launched more than 10 years ago. Both missions, originally designed for a 2.5 years nominal and 2.5 years extended lifetime, are still performing admirably without major degradation. To align the out-dated Mission Control System with the perspective of the potential lifetime into the 3 rd decade of this century, reducing costs and increasing flexibility, hardware, software and operational concept had to be revised. In 2013 the Ground Segment of these very successful missions underwent a major upgrade. Especially the Mission Control System went through a complex redesigning process. The hardware was migrated to a redundant Oracle Solaris server couple, hosting all clients and servers in so called ‘Logical Domains’ – similar to Virtual Machines. The user front end consists of several very thin clients with up to 4 monitors attached, which form with Sun Ray Server pairs the so called ‘Visualisation Layer’. This layer is able to connect to any machine, no matter if based on Windows, Linux or Solaris. Middleware software was optimized mitigating various identified risks. All this is actually in the process of getting deployed and phased-in without affecting the science observations efficiency.