Process and technologies for the transition of research algorithms to operations for real-time satellite processing

The development of satellite ground processing systems typically involves the creation of a custom-built platform for each new mission. As these systems are being developed, scientific algorithms must be implemented or re-engineered to work with both the software interfaces and the operational protocols of the ground processing environment. These activities introduce significant development overhead that is tangential to the product generation aspects of the system. This work presents a software architecture for the creation of operational data processing systems by configuring existing elements of a multi-mission scientific algorithm library. This library is comprised of algorithms and tools used to monitor, document, execute, and export structured data from those algorithms. Using this library of specially-developed multi-mission algorithms, the resulting systems are able to keep a tight loop between research and operational code and easily leverage existing effort. This results in reduced overhead and risk, and increases flexibility in the final system.