FAWKES Information Management for Space Situational Awareness

Abstract

Current space situational awareness assets can be fully utilized by managing their inputs and outputs in real time. Ideally, sensors are tasked to perform specific functions to maximize their effectiveness. Many sensors are capable of collecting more data than is needed for a particular purpose, leading to the potential to enhance a sensor's utilization by allowing it to be re-tasked in real time when it is determined that sufficient data has been acquired to meet the first task's requirements. In addition, understanding a situation involving fast-traveling objects in space may require inputs from more than one sensor, leading to a need for information sharing in real time. Observations that are not processed in real time may be archived to support forensic analysis for accidents and for long-term studies. Space Situational Awareness (SSA) requires an extremely robust distributed software platform to appropriately manage the collection and distribution for both real-time decision-making as well as for analysis. FAWKES is being developed as a Joint Space Operations Center (JSPOC) Mission System (JMS) compliant implementation of the AFRL Phoenix information management architecture. It implements a pub/sub/archive/query (PSAQ) approach to communications designed for high performance applications. FAWKES provides an easy to use, reliable interface for structuring parallel processing, and is particularly well suited to the requirements of SSA. In addition to supporting point-to-point communications, it offers an elegant and robust implementation of collective communications, to scatter, gather and reduce values. A query capability is also supported that enhances reliability. Archived messages can be queried to re-create a computation or to selectively retrieve previous publications.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA531866

Entities

People

  • George Ramseyer
  • Scot Tucker
  • Scott Spetka

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Computations
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Detectors
  • Fault Tolerance
  • High Performance Computing
  • Military Research
  • Network Protocols
  • Parallel Computing
  • Parallel Processing
  • Reliability
  • Situational Awareness
  • Space Situational Awareness
  • Space Surveillance
  • Supercomputers

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Aerospace Engineering.
  • Enterprise Information Systems Architecture and Joint Command Capability Interoperability Support.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Satellites