SITARS: The Future of NOAA's Spacecraft Information Management

Abstract

for NOAA, NESDIS Pete Phillips: The Aerospace Corporation contractor for NOAA NESDIS Operating spacecraft missions that stretch out literally across generations creates an absolute need for robust information management to ensure continuity of the corporate body of technical expertise. NOAA space missions fit this requirement profile exactly. For decades, the process used for capturing, managing, recalling and reporting on technical information originating from NOAA managed spacecraft has been well administered yet remained fundamentally problematic. The basis of the problem was that almost all information, was captured, stored, searched and sorted primarily in paper form. The data compiled originated from dozens of different yet related spacecraft, operated over several decades, by a large, complex, dynamic organization supporting "high profile" subscribers from around the world. With such inherent dynamics, the magnitude of "manual effort" required to thoroughly investigate any system legacy becomes readily apparent. Until recently, such investigative efforts were conducted primarily in one of two ways: 1) A long term employee with a good memory would be solicited to, "fill in the blanks" about what happened previously, why it happened and what was done about it. 2) An engineer would pore through a myriad of folders and binders seeking to extract the information necessary to bring the investigation to an enlightened conclusion. Unfortunately, these methods were inefficient for data retrieval timeliness and insufficient in the depth or relevance of detail eventually uncovered. Ultimately, the strategic result of this system was a strong direct correlation between the elapsed time of any system incident and the likelihood that the lessons learned during that incidents investigation would be lost.In late 2001, an "internal" NOAA team of government and contractor engineers set out to resolve this shortcoming. Within a year, at an initial direct cost of less than $2000, that team revolutionized how NOAA managed its spacecraft information by conceptualizing, designing, implementing, operating and maintaining a new, highly automated, data base driven process called the Spacecraft Information Tracking and Reporting System (SITARS) using a COTS application, FileMaker Pro, (FMP) as its foundation. Since its first of three major modules was incorporated into POES in Jan 2002, SITARS has enabled users to capture, sort, and search, the occurrence and evolution of every observation, operation, incident, anomaly, reconfiguration and status change of all spacecraft, systems, subsystems or components with a retrieval time measured in seconds, rather than days and at a level of detail that maximizes relevance and thoroughness. Furthermore, SITARS features near limitless flexibility, portability, compatibility and expandability thus easing the process of initial implementation and future enhancement. This ease of implementation is vividly illustrated by the fact that the entire system was designed and programmed as an "additional...