PrestoDecom: a portable software for house keeping telemetry decommutation

Access to housekeeping telemetry is recurrent throughout the whole life of a satellite. Flight control teams, spacecraft manufacturer engineers and subsystem experts are all interested in accessing telemetry parameters to make sure that the satellite is running nominally. This is usually fulfilled by a traditional web server embedded within the control centre which performs extraction and calibration of the raw telemetry. However, this centralized solution is usually available only at the beginning of the operations preparation. The raw telemetry which is produced outside the control centres, e.g. at the satellite supplier premises or on launch pads, is rarely exploited by experts who may miss useful information because of the lack of widespread extraction means. Hence the idea of developing a universal portable application called PrestoDecom offering the same facilities as those inside a control centre, allowing work on raw telemetry archives anywhere, especially when the control centre is inaccessible. This innovative software was successfully used in 2003 to validate the satellite simulator on the PROTEUS multiplatform project. PrestoDecom has been rapidly adopted inside CNES by a growing user community conquered by its simplicity and efficiency. Today 2/3 of CNES satellite projects have already invested into PrestoDecom and this product has won acclaim not only outside the control centres but also inside where it is installed on all work stations. Its success has reached beyond CNES with major European satellite contractors using it. PrestoDecom makes web server or test bench telemetry processing completely independent of control centres. It is now possible to use the same product throughout the life of different satellites (from conception to deorbiting) without relearning because it is designed to be easily customized with a unique multi satellite PC and Linux code base. As a result, tests show at least a 10 fold reduction in telemetry handling.