Experimenting with an Evolving Ground/Space-based Software Architecture to Enable Sensor Webs

摘要

A series of ongoing experiments are being conducted at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to explore integrated ground and space-based software architectures to enable sensor webs. A sensor web as defined by Steve Talabac at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), is a coherent set of distributed nodes interconnected by a communications fabric, that collectively behave as a single, dynamically adaptive, observing system. The nodes can be comprised of satellites, ground instruments, computing nodes etc. Sensor web capability requires autonomous management of constellation resources. This becomes progressively more important as more and more satellites share resources such as communication channels and ground stations while automatically coordinating their activities. There have been five ongoing activities along which include an effort to standardize a set of middleware to facilitate this vision. This paper will describe one set of activities using the Earth Observing 1 satellite, which used a variety of ground and flight software along with other satellites and ground sensors to prototype a sensor web. This activity allowed us to explore where the difficulties occurred in assembling sensor webs given today's technology. We will present an overview of the software system architecture, some key experiments and lessons learned to facilitate better sensor webs in the future.