ICS congratulates the FUSE team on 8 years of science return 

October 25, 2007 – Interface and Control Systems (ICS) is proud to have been part of the NASA Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) mission which was silenced today. Launched in June of 1999, the FUSE spacecraft has brought back significant science data and has successfully implemented a drastic and innovative cost reduction program. ICS wishes to congratulate Dr. Warren Moos from Johns Hopkins University who is the FUSE Principal Investigator for conducting an exemplary mission, and the FUSE science team for operating this satellite for nearly three times its designed life. We are especially proud of our staff at ICS for developing a system which has pioneered the use of the same autonomy software throughout the entire lifecycle of the mission. This architecture has been the basis of several other successful satellite missions and is being used for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV).

Dr. Moos and his team used the SCL software from ICS to automate the Bench Test Set, the Integration and Test Environment, the Mission Operations Center and the flight payload controller. As the mission was extended, one of the innovative cost-cutting moves was to automate the Mission Operations Center to have “lights-out operations”. Day-to-day tasking is web-based, passes are unmanned, and data is collected autonomously and passed over to the Space Telescope Science Institute for processing.

 NASA budget constraints required Dr. Moos to move the mission from a Geosynchronous Orbit (with little automation) to a Low Earth Orbit with sophisticated automation. The result was a mission which was executed at half the original budget.

ICS wishes to acknowledge the progressive, can-do attitude of the FUSE team and congratulate all who have made this NASA Origin’s Program possible. ICS is a privately held company with main offices in Columbia, MD, and Melbourne, FL. The product development and engineering services firm specializes in the development of real-time, embedded, and autonomous command and control software systems.