A University-Developed COSMOS to Operate Multiple Space Vehicles

The Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory (HSFL) was established at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2007 for two primary purposes: 1) to educate students and help prepare them to enter the technical workforce, and 2) to help establish a viable space industry that will benefit the State of Hawaii. HSFL is currently leading the effort to develop a solid-propellant launch vehicle, called Super Strypi, which is capable of placing a small satellite (,300 kg) into low Earth orbit (LEO), and various satellites from CubeSat (1 kg) to microsatellite ( 100 kg) size [1]. HSFL is installing the infrastructure and facilities to support space missions, such as clean rooms for integration and testing, ground stations, mission operations center, and simulators/test beds. It is the goal of HSFL to provide full life cycle mission operations support for its space missions. This requires the use of specialized software to develop and sustain mission operations. Based on a trade study and analysis of the various software packages and systems available, we determined that none met the full functionality and flexibility we desired while staying within our budget constraints. The primary author has experience with mission operations from many space missions and has developed some tools that have been successfully used in an LEO mission and a lunar mission [2] and would be well suited to HSFL’s needs (with some modifications and improvements). The idea of developing a comprehensive system of software and hardware to efficiently support mission operations for multiple spacecraft, especially small satellites, was thus born. We decided that such a system should have a framework for “plugging in” external applications and tools that would