REAL-TIME, INTEGRATED, TESTING OF COMPLEX SPACE ARCHITECTURES VIA CONSTELLATION'S DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS INTEGRATION LABORATORY (DSIL)

摘要

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has created the Constellation Program to develop the ground and flight systems which will enable human space exploration of the Moon and other planetary bodies. With the directive of returning to the Moon and beyond comes the opportunity to infuse modern technologies, the challenge of selecting the appropriate technologies that will enable this vision, and the understanding of how these new systems will perform together in a complex and dynamic environment. To support the development of this complex architecture, the Constellation Program is building a Distributed System Integration Laboratory (DSIL) to support real-time, integrated, testing of the ensemble of flight and ground systems. DSIL will be composed of simulators, emulators, and ultimately flight-like systems, which represent each of the Constellation elements and the communication and tracking system that links the flight vehicles and ground systems. At the moment, simulators for the Crew Exploration Vehicle, Crew Launch Vehicle, Mission Control Center, Launch Control Center, and Communications and Tracking Network have been developed and interconnected via a wide area network (WAN). This virtual laboratory will be used for verification of requirements between systems, end-to-end data flow demonstrations, early hardware/software integration, risk mitigation of the Command, Control, Communications and Information (C3I) standard, flight and mission dry runs, and crew training. This paper will describe DSIL and the elements that compose it, and will highlight the challenges of running a distributed WAN simulation that produces accurate and useful results.