Satellite and Ground System Solutions
at Your Fingertips
Computer Technology
Originating Technology/ NASA Contribution
In the summer of 1998, the blockbuster action movie
“Armageddon” captivated audiences with a thrilling
doomsday plot about a meteor the size of Texas
that was racing towards the Earth. Though the premise
of the movie was purely fictional, the unfortunate
reality is that near-Earth asteroids such as the
one portrayed in the film do exist.
On December 23, 2004, NASA announced that an asteroid
it anticipated to pass near the Earth on April
13, 2029, had been assigned the highest score to
date on the universally used Torino Impact Hazard
Scale. At first, the flyby distance for the asteroid,
dubbed MN4, was uncertain and an Earth impact could
not be ruled out. The odds of impact were initially
believed to be 1 in 300, high enough to merit special
monitoring by astronomers around the world, but
were then escalated to 1 in 37 on December 27.
NASA officials noted, however, that these odds
should not be of public concern, since they were
likely to change on a day-to-day basis as new data
were received. The officials were correct in their
assertion, as any chances of an impact with Earth
in 2029 were completely ruled out later that same
day.
Integral Systems,
Inc., a leading provider of satellite
ground systems and the first company to offer an
integrated suite of commercial-off-the-shelf software
products for satellite command and control, is
helping NASA keep a careful watch for any close-encountering
asteroids with its tracking technology. The company
supported the first NASA Discovery mission, the
Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) program,
back in 1996, and has expanded its business by
building more ground systems for a greater variety
of satellites than any other company in the world.
(NASA has since launched seven more Discovery missions,
with the eighth lifting off earlier this year.)
The experience gained from the company’s participation
in developing satellite command and control ground
systems for the NEAR program has bolstered its
flagship product line, the EPOCH Integrated Product
Suite (IPS), first featured in Spinoff 1997, and
led to the creation of its latest product, the
Skylight Direct Broadcast Ground Terminal.
Partnership
In supporting the NEAR program, Integral
Systems was selected by the Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory—the manager of this NASA Discovery
mission—in November 1996 to provide up to 15 Low-Earth
Orbit Autonomous Ground Terminals (LEO-Ts) for
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The LEO-Ts
were designed to make it easier and less expensive
for principal investigators to obtain telemetry,
tracking, and control services for the NEAR mission
and all other scientific endeavors managed by the
Applied Physics Laboratory. Integral Systems’s
work on this project was directly
incorporated into its commercial offering, the
EPOCH IPS. Additionally, Integral Systems’s continued
work
with Goddard has entitled it to adopt some of NASA’s
latest direct readout scientific algorithms for
its new Skylight product.
Product Outcome
Satellite operators spend billions of dollars ensuring
that orbiting satellites do not come crashing down,
and millions more just to send simple commands
to them. Integral Systems’s EPOCH IPS presents
a more efficient, economical alternative to costly
command and monitoring practices, as an all-in-one
orbital command and control system that can be
operated right from a user’s desktop.
Now that’s managing space from the workspace.
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Asteroids that
come within 121 million miles (195 million
kilometers) of the Sun are known as near-Earth
asteroids. Asteroid 433 Eros, pictured here
as a topographical shape model, is one of the
largest near-Earth asteroids. |
According to the company, every single U.S. weather
satellite operator and more than half of all global
commercial satellite operators depend on EPOCH
IPS to manage their satellites.
“We’ve become the de facto industry standard for
satellite operations,” said Steve Chamberlain,
Integral Systems’s chief executive officer. “We’ve
got the only software products that come right
out of the box and fly on any satellite from any
manufacturer.”
Customers employing EPOCH IPS can go from controlling
one spacecraft to another without ever leaving
their desk to go to another computer. The company
compares the comprehensive EPOCH technology to
a large, universal remote control; by simply pointing
and clicking at any controllable commercial satellite
whose information is stored in a computer system,
EPOCH IPS can fly it right from the desk chair
in front of that computer.
Government clients include NASA, the U.S. Air Force,
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
while commercial clients include Loral Skynet,
PanAmSat Corporation, and New Skies Satellites.
Following on the success of the EPOCH suite, Integral
Systems recently introduced the Skylight Direct
Broadcast Ground Terminal. Skylight was developed
to provide a complete architecture for the reception
and processing of remote-sensing data collected
from low-Earth
orbiting satellites. Some of these data are processed
to create fire-detection maps, volcano-eruption
alerts, and atmospheric profiles for sea surface
temperature and
vegetation indexes.
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Integral Systems,
Inc.’s satellite ground system facility. According
to the company, it has built more ground systems
for a greater variety of satellites than any
other company on Earth. |
The Skylight terrestrial-based terminal provides
full end-to-end image-processing capabilities,
including data acquisition and processing. All
of the capabilities are offered within a framework
that allows the system to evolve easily and cheaply.
For example, new missions can be easily added,
and the system can be reconfigured to support a
larger image-processing enterprise. Additionally,
geographic information system-based visualization
tools have been incorporated to allow searches
of archived images and their associated metadata,
and a Web-based data distribution process greatly
enhances the system’s ability to share data among
user groups anywhere in
the world.
In late 2003, the Institute for the Application
of Geospatial Technology (IAGT) at Cayuga Community
College, Inc., in Auburn, New York, installed a
complete Skylight ground system for receiving and
processing Earth science data. The system was purchased
through a partnership of Integral Systems with
Global Science and Technology, Inc., of Greenbelt,
Maryland. It is currently receiving, processing,
and storing data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA’s
Terra and Aqua satellites, two of the preeminent
aerial transmitters belonging to NASA’s Earth Observing
System. IAGT has a wide-ranging mission
to develop educational, scientific, and economic
applications of geospatial technologies, particularly
in the northeastern United States and in the Finger
Lakes region of upstate New York, where it is situated.
Access to MODIS data affords the institution great
opportunities, such as broadening aircraft-based
soil and vegetation analyses that bear on the Finger
Lakes grape harvest, a major economic contributor
in this winemaking region.
Skylight is now being repositioned to address military
situation-awareness applications. According to
the manufacturer, Skylight terminals could provide
field commanders and war fighters with up-to-date
weather information, taking the guesswork out of
deploying troops, military resources, and laser-guided
munitions in fast-changing weather scenarios.
Both the EPOCH IPS and Skylight product lines offer
end-to-end capability centered on highly distributed,
open-architecture design concepts. These features
allow complete systems to be implemented rapidly
and at a
very low cost, backing Integral Systems’s motto:
“Out-of-this-world solutions with down-to-Earth
pricing and automation, delivering an entirely
new world of data.”
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