Ground Control Key to Any Satellite Mission


The world's most advanced satellites, whether government or commercial, are only as good as the ground systems controlling them. Ground systems track and control the satellites, and process and analyze the information they gather. When it comes to developing and deploying satellite ground systems, Lanham, Maryland-based Integral Systems, Inc., [NASDAQ: ISYS] is a recognized leader, serving more than 50 satellite manufacturers and/or operators around the world.

Since its founding in 1982, Integral Systems has grown to 185 employees and annual revenues have exceeded $28 million. Focusing on providing solutions for satellite command and control, payload data processing, simulation, satellite integration, and flight software validation, the company has built more ground systems for a greater variety of satellites than any other firm.

The reason for Integral Systems' success is simple -- experience matters. Where satellite systems and operations, computer software and hardware, engineering/mathematical analysis and end-user applications are required, Integral Systems has proven itself to be an innovator of quality products. Extensive experience and innovative thinking enable the company to construct ground systems that exceed traditional performance, cost and schedule expectations, while mitigating program risk. Combined with solid financial strength and a strong customer service ethic, the company's technical expertise has earned Integral Systems repeat business from many of the world's leading satellite manufacturers and operators.

In the last decade, global competitive pressures have necessitated cost reductions in communications satellite programs. Therefore, cost-effective ground systems can be key to a program's economic viability. Integral Systems meets this challenge with its EPOCH 2000 product, a command and control system designed to operate any number of satellites from any manufacturer with a minimum number of personnel. The product's open architecture, combined with a graphical user interface (GUI) and automated monitoring and control features, allows operators to monitor and control satellites and ground equipment simultaneously. The result is an affordable and reliable satellite ground system.

The EPOCH 2000 command and control system enables customers -- such as Loral Skynet and EchoStar, among others -- to operate all of their satellites from a single workstation-based control center. The EPOCH 2000 product line also is crucial to satellite operations for U.S. government agencies, including NASA, NOAA, the Air Force and the Navy. The product line is a complete, off-the-shelf solution supporting payload development, satellite integration, launch control and monitoring, and on-orbit operations. The system features a modern, distributed architecture consisting of a series of workstations interconnected via a local area network (LAN).

"Workstations provide superior performance at a fraction of the cost of the central mainframes or minicomputers traditionally used in satellite ground systems," said Pat McManus, a product manager at Integral Systems. "Furthermore, workstations operate in an office environment and don't require an expensive computer room, power service or cooling system. And, as each workstation operates independently, there is no single point of failure. For critical applications, the LAN itself can be made redundant."

The typical EPOCH 2000 installation consists of a front-end processor interfaced to the front-end hardware and a series of workstations, all interconnected via the LAN. From the workstations, users control and monitor satellites and ground equipment and perform off-line functions, such as statistical trending and orbit analysis. This approach distributes the processing burden across the network.

"The system can be expanded up to the capacity of the network by adding new workstation nodes," McManus said. "Even network capacity limitations can be overcome by dividing the system into subnets interconnected by bridges and routers. Thus, additional users can be accommodated during peak loads without degrading system response times."

She continued, "Because the system is distributed, expensive peripherals, such as color printers, can be shared across the network. EPOCH 2000 customers don't need to buy a separate device for each station. Also, because EPOCH 2000 supports open architecture standards, a host of third-party, add-on hardware and software products is available, eliminating the threat of peripherals' obsolescence and saving the expense of reinventing the wheel."

All of the EPOCH 2000 software is database-driven, enabling it to support satellite design changes, or a different series of satellites without modifying the underlying software. This flexibility allows the initial system acquisition costs to be amortized over years of operation. The software can be rehosted to virtually any host processor, and a wide variety of third-party peripherals and software tools may be added.

According to McManus, a key feature of any satellite ground command and control system, especially the EPOCH 2000 system, is its ability to acquire, process and analyze data. In addition to providing a real-time processing capability, the EPOCH 2000 system also includes an off-line analysis module: the Archive Browser and Extractor (ABE). Satellite engineers and controllers use ABE to analyze archived satellite data to determine trends and quantify spacecraft and ground system performance. ABE automates many operations, reducing the data analysis costs associated with satellite missions.

"With the ABE module, routine data analysis and report generation do not require user intervention during off-hours," McManus said. "This maximizes system performance and significantly reduces costs."

Realizing that ABE must offer robust numerical analysis tools and advanced graphical output, Integral Systems built the module using PV-WAVE from Houston-based Visual Numerics, Inc. PV-WAVE is an array-oriented, fourth-generation programming language (4GL) used by engineers, scientists, business analysts and software developers to build and deploy visual data analysis (VDA) applications. These applications enable users to visualize and manipulate complex or extremely large technical datasets to detect and display patterns, trends, anomalies and other vital information. The software includes hundreds of mathematical and statistical routines from the IMSL Numerical Libraries, as well as image processing, signal processing, mapping and general data manipulation features. Because PV-WAVE's 4GL simplifies programming and does not require the tedious edit-compile-link-debug cycle required by traditional languages, users can develop fully portable applications much faster than with C/C++ or FORTRAN.

"Prior to using PV-WAVE, we wrote our own custom data analysis software packages for satellites," McManus said. "But this was time-consuming and costly. Because PV-WAVE is considered the industry standard for data analysis and visualization, and because it's portable to any UNIX, OpenVMS or Windows NT system, we decided to use it as ABE's analysis and graphics engine." She continued, "Many of our customers are so impressed with ABE's analysis and display capabilities that they buy a development license of PV-WAVE to gain full access to all of the software's functionality. In doing so, they can extend their ABE software package to include additional specific functionality."

Over the past 16 years, Integral Systems has supported some of the most important science missions of modern history -- a difficult task since mission requirements are complex and differ greatly from one mission to another. In the face of science program budget cuts, the EPOCH 2000 product allows new space programs to reduce their overall costs, thereby saving scarce dollars for more research.

For example, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory selected Integral Systems to support the first NASA Discovery Mission: the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Program. NEAR is the first in a series of low-cost, small-planet exploratory missions designed to gather data about asteroids in the solar system. The EPOCH 2000 product forms the core of the mission's command and control ground system. As an off-the-shelf product, EPOCH 2000 minimizes the need for custom software development, thereby shortening implementation schedules, reducing program risk and minimizing cost.

"It's nice to know that our products help to advance space communications and science," McManus said. "It makes our daily work routine just a little more rewarding."

Additional information about Integral Systems and the EPOCH 2000 satellite ground system is available at the company's Website: www.integ.com.