Airborne Science Mission Tool Suite

The NASA Airborne Science Mission Tool Suite supports the Airborne Science Program (ASP) and the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Earth Science Division by providing a suite of web-based capabilities to support Airborne Science Missions. ASP Mission Tool Suite is the ground complement to the NASA SensorNet project, which is developing the airborne networking infrastructure to enable high speed SATCOM of aircraft parameter data, and instrument data during flight missions. The ASP Mission Tools Suite provides a common operating picture for improved situational awareness for all participants in NASA Airborne Science missions from scientists and engineers, to managers, as well as the general public. The intent of the system is to encourage more responsive and collaborative measurements between instruments on multiple aircraft, satellites, and on the surface in order to increase the scientific value of the measurements, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of flight missions. At its most basic, ASP Mission Tool Suite provides a means for visualizing the position of the aircraft and instruments during the course of the mission. Such information is made more useful when compared with or overlaid upon other datasets and model outputs used for mission planning and science data analysis. Additionally, ASP Mission Tool Suite facilitates communication between mission team members to enable analysis and discussion of multiple data sources to help plan and execute science missions.

The ASP Mission Tool Suite contains a core set of tools that provide Airborne Science Participants with a host of capabilities:

• remotely monitor real-time aircraft location
• view current and archived aircraft flight tracks
• ability to add information overlays from a curated product registry
• customized user workspaces
• communication and collaboration tools
• integrated IRC client supporting multiuser and person-to-person private chat
• remotely monitor real-time instrument engineering data
• plotting and graphing
• and more...

Screenshots

Screenshot depicting an example user workspace. Users can customize their workspace with the mission tools and layout configuration that best suites their requirements. Users can also customize and add/remove pages to help organize their workspace. This screenshot also illustrates the basic 2D Aircraft Tracker and the integrated ASP chat client. The Aircraft Tracker permits users to load current and archived flight tracks for Airborne Science aircraft. The Aircraft Tracker also seemlessly integrates with the ASP Data Product Registry, which is a curated registry of common data products used across the ASP program and campaigns.The integrated Internet Relay Chat client enables users to connect to multiple IRC servers and channels and participate in group and private chat sessions directly within the workspace window.

Similar to the ASP Public Aircraft Tracker, the ASP Mission Tools Suite provides the ability to simultaneously monitor multiple aircraft, but provides additional functionality that permits users to customize the visible aircraft, automated loading of flight tracks, the ability to follow aircraft and automatically pan the map to track aircraft without user input.

The ASP Mission Tools Suite seamlessly integrates with the ASP Program Data Product Registry. The purpose of the registry is primarily geared towards providing users with a core cross-cutting set of data products that can be shared, reused, searchable, and easily integrated into the monitoring environment. Given Airborne Science missions require coordination from a number of different technical specialties such as pilots, mission scientist, mission flight planners, the registry serves an ancillary purpose of providing a simple way to share data products across the participating stakeholders.

The Airborne Science Mission Tools Suite provides a 3-D (Google Earth) based monitoring solution that complements the 2-D version of the tool. The user interface between the 2-D and 3-D solutions are complementary so users can switch from one tool to another with little or no learning curve.

The screenshot illustrates how simple layout changes can be used to customize a workspace. In this screenshot, both the 2-D and 3-D versions of the Aircraft Monitor are shown.

The Mission Tools Suite provides a number of Collaboration and Communication (C2) tools, including basic CMS (i.e., Content Management System) capabilities. The Mission Tools Suite extends the open source product called Liferay. Liferay provides a number of tools to enable secure files sharing within a team, and simplifies the setup and configuration for team collaboration via wikis, blogs, shared bookmarking, message boards.