Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)Utilizing Goddard Mission Services Evolution Center (GMSEC)
Julio L. Marius, James Busch · SpaceOps 2008 Conference · 2008
The TRMM mission life was recently extended with current estimates that mission operations will continue through the 2012-2013 timeframe. Faced with this extended mission profile, the Earth Science Mission Operations Project (ESMO) has embarked on a technology refresh and re-engineering effort to reduce the cost of mission operations. To this end, it was decided to utilize a middleware-based messaging architecture to enable fully redundant lights-out of flight operations activities. The middleware approach selected was based on the Goddard Mission Services Evolution Center (GMSEC) architecture, tools and associated open-source Applications Programming Interface (API). This paper presents an overview of the TRMM light-out approach and the experiences, architecture, approach and lessons learned of the TRMM re-engineering effort centered on the GMSEC middleware architecture and tool suite. In addition, information is presented that relates to the dual redundant parallel nature of the Telemetry and Command (T&C) and Front-End systems and how these systems can interact over a middleware bus to achieve autonomous operations including autonomous commanding to recover missing science data during the same spacecraft operational contact.