Gateways — Translating between space and ground

Cloud software has changed space in nearly every conceivable way, yet it remains overshadowed by hardware’s historical dominance of the space narrative. This is the case for both space-based and ground-based hardware, from satellites, to ground networks to mission control. As software continues to eat space, we present a series of posts on some of the most unique aspects of Major Tom’s cloud-based architecture and how to add true value to satellite builders, owners, operators and end-users.

Industry Standards for Mission Operations

Today there exists a set of problems centered around the most critical function of a satellite mission; it’s day-to-day operations:

• Both ground station networks and on-premise ground station hardware exist on the market, but typically the software integration is at best a raw mod/demod interface, or if you’re lucky a raw IP socket.
• On top of current infrastructure, satellite operators typically need to implement their own ground-side telemetry parsing, command-and-control (C2), ground station pass scheduling, job scheduling, file transfer chunking, and more.
• For the very few ground station products that claim to integrate “out of the box” with a satellite’s telemetry and C2, the reality of fractured space-based data standards is that satellite companies are required to add risky and complex protocol translation layers either in their on-board software or in front of their ground station just to get it to work properly
• Satellite operators (especially new ones) typically hold off on implementing ground control software until they are near the end of the engineering of their satellite, adding risk and uncertainty for how the precious satellite data will arrive in their data centers.

Major Tom is the result of thinking about how to solve these problems. In this post, we explore our primary solution to the problems mentioned above — The Major Tom Gateway.

What is a Gateway?

We begin with an overview of Major Tom’s flexible architecture via an explanation of the Gateway and the Gateway API. Gateways are a common term in the space industry, typically referring to a ground station hub or terminal. In the case of Major Tom, a Gateway can be thought of as the translation layer between your satellite and Major Tom. Messages from Major Tom can contain information about the state of the world (such as Pass Events) or the actions of an Operator (such as clicking to execute a command). Messages to Major Tom contain information to help drive the UI, such as the progress of a file download, the telemetry from a satellite, or the status of a command being executed. The Gateway translates these messages to be read by the appropriate recipient.

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To read more, follow this link. The full post was originally published on June 15, 2021 at https://www.kubos.com/gatewayblog/