Sharing Telemetry across Organizations and Systems

The XTCE (XML Telemetric and Command
Exchange) standard provides a way to describe space mission
telemetry and command “databases” (or dictionaries) to be
exchanged across centers and space agencies. Having a
standard format for describing the telemetry and command
formats allows for the development or adoption of compatible
tools and significantly reduces the amount of custom software
development often needed to ensure all system components
have access to consistent format definitions. The main
objective of this paper is to show how powerful XTCE is in
terms of interoperability across organizations. This paper
summarizes work which entailed converting the mission
telemetry database for a current NASA mission, in XTCE
format, into several target mission operation databases
associated with different telemetry and command toolchains,
and then, comparing the results of the telemetry processing
and display. The target toolchains selected were Ball
Aerospace/COSMOS, NASA-GSFC/ITOS (Goddard Space
Flight Center/Integrated Test and Operations System), and
NASA-AMMOS/AMPCS (Advanced Multi-Mission Operations
System/Mission Data Processing and Control System) – all
real-time telemetry and command processing systems.