A set of analysis tools has been created in a community-based team environment to support NASA ground resource allocation and planning. This new tool, called GRAPE (Ground Resource Allocation and Planning Environment), combines analysis, monitoring, and search capabilities into an existing community environment where wikis, blogs, document libraries, calendars, discussion forums, lists, progress management, and email repositories are available in a web site which assists users with their communication, operation, analysis, and collaboration needs. Keywords-resource management; planning; Internet I. OBJECTIVESSocial networking has been very successful in the Web 2.0 era. In large organizations, it facilitates communication and team collaboration among distributed groups. The resource allocation process in NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) has increasing needs for resource allocation and scheduling collaboration in various stakeholder organizations. A community-based environment helps to address domain issues such as team communication and knowledge sharing. However, it does not address daily analysis needs. Users still require separate tools for daily work ranging from operations and analysis to status monitoring and reporting. In order to provide a complete and working team environment, these capabilities need to be integrated into a single social application, so team members can conduct daily business and share information efficiently. Thus, analysis and operation tools must be developed and seamlessly integrated into this collaborative web environment to maximize its effectiveness. These tools must also link to visualization components and be conveniently accessible through a browser in common operating systems. A collaborative team portal is a one stop environment for team communication, operation, data analysis, workspace monitoring, knowledge sharing, information discovery, linkage to existing services, and visualization. This can simplify work processes and deployment while reducing development and maintenance costs. Users are empowered to create content (including web sites) and managers can manage access permissions without the involvement of system administrators. Figure 1 depicts the objectives of the Ground Resource Allocation and Planning Environment (GRAPE) to provide analysis, monitoring, information, search, and collaboration all in one single team portal. Figure 1. The objectives of GRAPE II. DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH, ENGINEERING, OR OPERATIONS APPROACHThe goal of GRAPE is to integrate analysis and operation capabilities into a team collaboration environment so that users can perform their work and stay connected in the same environment. In order to achieve this goal, a collaborative team environment was adopted as a basis for developing and adding analysis and operations capabilities. A. Team collaboration environmentJPL's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) recently adopted Microsoft SharePoint 2007 as one of the components in its institutional team collaboration space, called Collab...

In today's operations environment, the teams are smaller and need to be more efficient while still ensuring the safety and success of the mission. In addition, teams often begin working on a mission in its early development phases and continue on the team through actual operations. For these reasons the operations teams want to be presented with a software environment that integrates multiple needed software applications as well as providing them with context sensitive editing support for entering commands and sequences of commands. At Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Multi-Mission Planning and Sequencing (MPS) Editor provided by the Multi-Mission Ground Systems and Services (MGSS) supports those operational needs.

Uplink is an important part of spacecraft operations. Ensuring the accuracy of uplink content is essential to mission success. Before commands are radiated to the spacecraft, the command and sequence must be reviewed and verified by various teams. In most cases, this process requires collecting the command data, reviewing the data during a command conference meeting, and providing physical signatures by designated members of various teams to signify approval of the data. If commands or sequences are disapproved for some reason, the whole process must be restarted. Recording data and decision history is important for traceability reasons. Given that many steps and people are involved in this process, an easily accessible software tool for managing the process is vital to reducing human error which could result in uplinking incorrect data to the spacecraft. An uplink summary generator called ULSGEN was developed to assist this uplink content approval process. ULSGEN generates a web-based summary of uplink file content and provides an online review process. Spacecraft operations personnel view this summary as a final check before actual radiation of the uplink data.