Team Leader Mak, CoFounder Neb and Exploration Tech Scientist Edin

In the “What I’d be thinking about if I were you’ session of the Team Summit meeting last month, Rob Kelso talked about mission operations, the differences between ops and development, and getting operations involved early in the mission development process as soon as possible, given the current stage of team developments. Our challenge has always been how to integrate multiple separate development projects into one unified lunar exploration mission. We blogged about the solution last year, May 2011, when we introduced our Mission Development & Operations Control System;

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/teams/synergy-moon/blog/mission-develop...



The description and the ‘meat’ of the system come from Dr. Jason Held of Saber Astronautics. We will utilize a system they developed, the Predictive Interactive Ground Station Interface (PIGI) as the heart of MDOCS. PIGI couples a rich 3D graphic user interface of spacecraft operations to back end artificial intelligence. Rather than showing long lists of telemetry variables, PIGI allows “drilling down” into the data that is most important to the operator, greatly reducing human error, cost overhead, and improving recovery time from single event upsets. PIGI has already passed through a variety of testing scenarios and situations:


• tested for a wide range of systems
• detecting impacts of a satellite demonstrator at CSIRO,
• lunar base performance in high fidelity simulation at the University of Stuttguart,
• modeling aircraft grade metal stress at the University of New South Wales,
• tracking performance of a live rocket,
• stock market analysis and financial tracking systems.


PIGI is the heart of MDOCS because it has been developed specifically for spacecraft operations support, but the soul of MDOCS will come from another system, called the MPPT Ring, developed by Dr. Edin Omerdic. We first introduced Edin in a July 2009 blog;

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/teams/synergy-moon/blog/meet-dr-edin-om...



MPPT Ring is a multi‐purpose platform product, which enables easy system integration, planning, simulation, training, fault‐tolerant control, enhanced operator interface, auto‐enhanced survey execution and offline analysis of subsea operations featuring remote operated underwater vehicles, undersea ‘spacecraft’.
MPPT Ring Features:


• Signal‐level compatibility between simulated and real‐world environment,
• 3D real‐time visualisation of navigation data,
• Real‐time vessel and sonar simulators,
• Advanced, flexible fault‐tolerant control system with auto‐tuning capabilities,
• Open architecture for rapid control prototyping and hardware‐in‐the‐loop development,
• Set of aiding tools for ROV pilot.


Edin’s current project, OceanRINGS is a set of smart technologies, designed for existing and next generation Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), which increase the level of automation, make ROV operations easier & more efficient, and save expensive ship time by 20% or more. ROV LATIS is a next generation smart ROV, designed as a prototype platform to demonstrate OceanRINGS validity & operability and to prove smart technologies developed in the Mobile and Marine Robotics Research Centre, UL. System validation and technology demonstration for OceanRINGS and MPPT Ring have been performed through a series of test trials with different support vessels off the west coast of Ireland.



It’s easy to see how these systems compliment each other and how the Ring systems can inform the implementation of PIGI into our Mission Development & Operations Control System for interplanetary exploration development and operations support.



Learn more about PiGI here:

http://www.saberastro.com/home/research/projects.html



The link in the blog about Edin is broken, but you can learn more about the MPPT Ring by looking at the poster here:

http://www.synergymoon.com/MPPT_Ring_Poster.pdf