Major Tom: Mission Ops for the 21st century
We’re excited to announce the newest part of the Kubos space software platform, Major Tom
As teased in my post “Eating Space with Software”, Major Tom fits comfortably between the “developer tools” and “management / analytics” components of our platform, offering both:
- A development tool that works out of the box with the Kubos SDK and COTS engineering hardware, allowing developers to test their code in a real operations environment before a satellite even launches
- A highly usable web based mission operations platform that connects to ground station networks in the cloud, or integrates with in-house ground station hardware
As we’ve collected feedback from our users and built out KubOS 1.0, we noticed a building set of problems 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 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, introducing 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.
By offering tight integration with both KubOS RT and KubOS Linux, Major Tom is truly out of the box operations software that reports data the way you expect it directly from your KubOS applications. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Monitoring / thresholds for any subsystem telemetry
- File download / upload between multiple ground station passes
- Prioritized Job queue management
- Integrated Command and control shell
Since Major Tom works with the KubOS SDK, satellite developers are ready for operations on day 1 because it has been with them every day in their development environment.
Major Tom is being designed to work with both existing ground-station networks and on-premise ground station hardware, but we are limiting our rollout to a few interested private beta testers to begin with.
If you’re interested in joining our private beta, request a demo and let’s talk!
