Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control are open source open access software for monitoring and controlling small spacecraft. The software is designed to provide an application and framework that can be adapted quickly and easily to support a variety of spacecraft including CubeSats, myPocketQubs and NanoLab experiments, and sounding rocket and high altitude balloon experiments such as are carried by the REXUS/BEXUS program.

The Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control frameworks

The Open Mission Control (desktop/server) and Pocket Mission Control (app) frameworks consist of an application and graphical user interface which contain the basic structure of the program, and the Open Mission Control toolbox, which provides a number of ready to use functions typically required for mission control applicationa.

The Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control application and graphical user interface can be adapted to a project quickly and easily, by populating them with elements from the Open Mission Control toolbox and other standard library elements. This approach allows also users with limited programming experience to create sophisticated mission control software by building on a solid basic implementation.

Use and verification

Designed to work with any spacecraft project, Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control have been tested with the RAX2 mission and will support KickSat Sprites, two hundred crowd funded ChipSat proof of concept personal spacecraft, UKube-1, the first United Kingdom Space Agency CubeSat and other missions.

The first use case is for professional monitoring, command and control of a real spacecraft. This will demonstrate the ability of Open Mission Control to address all the requirements of such a task.

The second use case involves schools and universities – they will use Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control to monitor telemetry and locate spacecraft using integrated augmented reality functionality. We also hope that a few of these groups will try modifying our software to support certain aspects of their payloads, which require a custom interface.

The third main use case involves the use of Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control as monitoring software for the various scientific and engineering sub-payloads that will fly on myPocketQub 442, a CubeSat payload. The students conducting these experiments will use Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control to access and store the data from these payload experiments for analysis and research.

Another important use case is communication with engineering models of the real spacecraft which will be made available on the Internet. These engineering models are duplicates of the flight hardware and allow Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control to command and monitor them and their sub-payloads in real time and to simulate different critical mission phases under real conditions.

Development and distribution

Open Mission Control and Pocket Mission Control are currently under development with an initial complete release targeting Q4 2013. Open Mission Control is written in a mixture of LabView and C and source code and executables are available for download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Pocket Mission Control is built using the Unity3D framework with C# and JavaScript source code targeting Android and iOS.

Contribute

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