A Unified Situational Awareness Dashboard for Spacecraft Operations: An integrated, Fleet-centric, Cloud Computing Based Solution

Many space agencies, centers, and organizations separate spacecraft operations into mission-specific operations centers. While this separation has advantages, it poses significant challenges when technical staff, and leadership wish to view, and evaluate historical, current, and future state of the fleet, rather than a single spacecraft. To overcome this disadvantage of this approach it was determined necessary to develop a secure rich web application, which integrates disparate data sets, into a unified situational awareness dashboard. To facilitate the rapid design, development, integration, testing, and deployment of this dashboard, an existing cloud computing platform was utilized. In addition, an open source operating system, computing languages, and version control system were used, to control cost. Five virtual machine instances were deployed on a government certified public cloud computing provider. One instance securely receives disparate data, from spacecraft operation centers, then extracts, transforms, normalizes, and loads them onto data stores. Other instances play the roles of an administrative server, an application server, and a web server that securely provides the data visually, and as a Restful web service API, only to specific IP addresses, and to authenticated and authorized users.