Pinched by budget cuts in 1998, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre was under pressure to improve operations while reducing costs. The center had already reduced control-room coverage for some of its small explorer satellite missions, from 24/7 to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, in order to save money. But that change made some people nervous.
"We lost the ability to maintain 24/7 operations, which increased the risks for missions if something went wrong," says Rick Saylor, the lead development engineer for small explorer mission (SMEX) satellites at the time. "We didn't have insight into the health of the satellites, and we wanted to mitigate that risk."
If one of the US$65 million satellites experienced any problems, NASA engineers wouldn't know about it until the next business day. The satellite, meanwhile, could switch into safe mode, shutting down all but essential operations to stay in orbit. But it would cease gathering information until the problem was corrected.
Jeff Fox, now president of wireless solutions provider Mobile Foundations, was working for NASA on a general research project at the time. NASA then asked Fox to develop a solution that would limit the risks for the upcoming TRACE (Transition Region and Coronal Explorer) mission. It would be the first time the agency would use an 8-to-5 monitoring schedule for a new mission. All other operations that had abandoned 24/7 on-site monitoring had ceased delivering primary data, although they still sent information.
NASA needed a solution that could notify engineers who were not in the control room about events occurring in the spacecraft; provide online summaries of data sent to ground stations when the craft passed over the earth several times each day; and alert engineers to any trouble the satellite might experience.
