NASA Announces Software of the Year Award

July 22, 2005 The NASA Software Advisory Panel announced today winners of the NASA Software of the Year Award for 2005. The two winners are The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE) software submitted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Land Information System Software (LIS) submitted by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

The ASE software allows autonomous operations in flight and has been successfully used on the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) Mission. EO-1 is currently using this onboard decision-making software to change the satellite’s priorities without the involvement – or even knowledge – of ground controllers in order to observe unexpected environmental phenomena on the earth’s surface. Interface & Control Systems, Inc. (ICS) played a key role in the ASE software effort by providing both software engineering to the ASE team, as well as providing ICS’s product “SCL”.  The SCL software suite provides the architectural software components that enable plug-in autonomy agents such as Continuous Activity Scheduling Planning Execution and Replanning (CASPER) and Livingstone 2 to communicate with the SCL robust scripting executive to execute the agent’s directives in real-time.  Beyond providing an integration frameworks for other Artificial Intelligence technologies, SCL itself is built around a real-time Expert System capable of performing Fault Detection Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) for the spacecraft and subsystems.  SCL provides a full-featured scripting language and a command formatting capability for low-level device control.  Additionally, SCL provides a Rule-Based Expert System capable of on-board real-time monitor and control and autonomous reaction to changing data points.  The SCL system is flight-proven and had been on-orbit for more than 6 years on the NASA FUSE satellite.

Contributions by the ICS software development team have allowed EO-1 to use the ASE software as the primary means of operations since November 2004. “ICS has a group of highly motivated, forward-thinking engineers, we are proud to be part of this winning team”, said Jim Van Gaasbeck, VP at ICS.  “Our team shows the type of dedication that is needed to keep our company at the forefront of technological breakthroughs”.

Such breakthroughs in remote sensing operations depend on significant advances in spacecraft autonomy, onboard data processing, and inter-satellite communication. ICS has been considered a leader in autonomous real-time satellite command and control systems for almost two decades. “By making satellites less dependent on human intervention, they are able to respond to temporal events in a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or even weeks” Van Gaasbeck says. 

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.

For more information on the NASA 2005 Software of the Year awards see:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/sep/HQ_05249_Software_of_the_year.html

http://icb.nasa.gov/2005SWOY/

http://icb.nasa.gov/nasaswy.html has a link to the ASE page (http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov/) where the role of SCL is mentioned along with the mission status.

 

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