Leveraging Advanced Software Technologies for Implementing the European Space Situational Awareness Ground Data Systems

Abstract

The preparatory phase of the European Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme has started in 2009. The SSA system will be a distributed federation of existing and new assets. The detailed architecture of the SSA system will be defined in the course of the preparatory programme. It will comprise a number of SSA related sensors and four dedicated data and service provision centres. The federated sensors will deliver the related (raw) data. The data centres will host the SSA services, which process the data and provide the higher level products to the SSA user community. From a ground data systems perspective the most significant requirements of the SSA programme at system-level can be summarised as reliability and dependability, security, performance, distribution, maintainability, modularity, interoperability, long time support and life perspective of involved ground data systems. In order to address these requirements adequately, it is envisaged to deploy the SSA services on a Common SSA Integration Framework, in short COSIF, based on the principles of the Service Oriented Architecture, SOA. The COSIF shall enable the integration of existing SSA assets as well as deployment of new heterogeneous SSA applications. It shall serve as the backbone integration framework for all SSA ground data systems. The specific SSA services will be developed and integrated as web service components on the top of this framework. The implementation of the COSIF shall be based on an off-the-shelf open-source or commercial SOA framework. For this purpose a dedicated activity has been initiated at the European Space Agency, which has identified five candidate SOA suites for detailed evaluation. This evaluation is based on implementation of a set of Proof-of-Concept cases. This paper provides a software engineering perspective to the SSA ground data systems and elaborates on the approach towards adoption of the state-of-the-art SOA technologies for the implementation of the SSA ground data systems. It will focus on how the SSA ground data systems can apply the principles of the Service Oriented Architecture to embrace the operational requirements of a large scale, distributed, security and performance sensitive space programme like the European SSA programme.

Microservice-Based Platform for Space Situational Awareness Data Analytics

“…redis, which provides the cache service, stores the processing results and the data retrieved from MySQL and mongoDB that needs to be used multiple times temporarily. 8 International Journal of Aerospace Engineering…”

“…To address these challenges, cloud computing, big data, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are applied to the SSAIS [5] and the SSAISs are deployed on the cloud based on various technologies such as virtualization [4]. The European Space Agency (ESA) has established the SSA preparatory system based on SOA [8], and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has established the OrbitOutlook project by using SOA to integrate datasets from multiple countries, organizations, and enterprises [9,10]. To obtain an efficient and flexible SSAIS by 2020 [11], the United States is building the Joint Space Operations Center Mission System (JMS), a worldwide state-of-the-art SSAIS, based on cloud computing and SOA [12].…”

How to do SOA right? An SOA Governance Framework for the ESA Space Situational Awareness Preparatory Programme

“…COSIF builds on commercial SOA middleware, extending it with a layer of vendor independent generic utility services, with the purpose of avoiding undesired future vendor lock-in. Oracle Fusion Middleware has been selected as the underlying SOA suite, based on an elaborate and systematic evaluation and assessment activity which was performed in 2010 and described in [12]. The SSA specific services are currently being developed and deployed on the COSIF in a number of parallel software development projects with European industry throughout Europe.…”