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International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / The rapid technology growth in the aerospace industry continues to manifest itself in increasingly complex computer systems and weapons systems platforms. To meet the data processing challenges associated with these new weapons systems, the Air Force Flight Test Center (AFFTC) is developing the next generation of data acquisition and processing systems under the Advanced Data Acquisition and Processing Systems (ADAPS) Program. The ADAPS program has evolved into an approach that utilizes Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components as the foundation for Air Force enhancements to meet specific customer requirements. The ADAPS program has transitioned from concept exploration to engineering and manufacturing development (EMD). This includes the completion of a detailed requirements analysis and a overall system design. This paper will discuss the current status of the ADAPS program including the requirements analysis process, details of the system design, and the result of current COTS acquisitions.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The space shuttle has been flying for seventeen years and NASA plans to fly it for many more. To meet the requirement of supporting future flights, NASA has undertaken a Shuttle Upgrades Program to improve various shuttle components. The avionics on the solid rocket booster (SRB) is one of the areas being upgraded. To develop avionics hardware, the environments that they are to encounter during flight must be defined to a higher degree of fidelity than is currently available. This paper describes the effort to determine these environments via the use of a commercial off the shelf data acquisition system.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / We have long used standards to guide the development process of software systems. Standards such as POSIX, X-Windows, SQL have become part of the language of software developers and have guided the coding of systems that are intended to be portable and interoperable. Standards also have a role to play in the integration of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we have been participating on the Renaissance Team, a reengineering effort that has seen the focus shift from custom-built systems to the use of COTS to satisfy prime mission functions. As part of this effort, we developed a process that identified standards that are applicable to the evaluation and integration of products and assessed how those standards should be applied. Since the goal is to develop a set of standards that can be used to instantiate systems of differing sizes and capabilities, the standards selected have been broken into four areas: global integration standards, global development standards, mission development standards, and mission integration standards. Each of the areas is less restrictive than the preceding area in the standards that are allowed. This paper describes the process that we used to select and categorize the standards to be applied to Renaissance systems.

Master of Science / Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering / John Devore / Instead of designing new proprietary hardware to replace aging, obsolete systems, the defense industry is looking towards Components Off The Shelf (COTS). COTS are attractive for a number of reasons. First, by using COTS, nonrecurring design costs are divided among all costumers. Second, because COTS suppliers have an economy of scale, the suppliers are able to reduce the cost of components, making systems more affordable than low-volume, proprietary solutions. Third, using COTS accelerates the time to market by reducing the time required for design and making extensive design verification unnecessary. Fourth, COTS hardware produces a scalable solution, as one COTS systems could easily be replaced with a different COTS system that would more readily meet the customer's unique demands. This thesis attempts to explain the implementation of a COTS-based flight computer. The PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) standard has been selected because it is both rugged and widely accepted by industry. The PMC is a common standard with a variety of COTS parts, making it easily exchangeable. While the COTS solution reduces design overhead, it does not eliminate the need for design altogether. Although the contractor would no longer be required to design the features provided by the COTS, they would be required to design the overall system and the integration of the COTS. This thesis documents the design of a system that takes two PMC cards – the COTS – and integrates those cards together and interfaces them with the flight systems. The interfacing of COTS components is also extended to provide a high-speed serial link in order to connect two PMC carrier boards for a total of four COTS PMCs. Further, the testability of the final system is explored to provide an end product that is verifiably sufficient.

Small satellites refer to a new breed of smaller and computationally capable satellites, which serve as a ?faster, better, cheaper? means of realizing space missions. To ensure success of a small satellite mission, it is important that systems engineering be applied at the initial stages of the program formalization to provide a basis for defining mission strategies, managing requirements, risk analysis, performing design trades and estimating cost. The objective of this thesis is to formalize a small satellite mission plan while providing recommendations in areas involving design optimization, systems engineering, project management, cost modeling, subsystem design and selection. Finally, this thesis details the preliminary design of a conceptual ?MSUSAT? small satellite, using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components, from a systems engineering perspective. It explains the choice of orbit, payload and other subsystem components that are necessary to ensure that the mission fulfils its objective.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper describes the development of a compact mobile telemetry system using commercial-off-the-shelf components. The personal computer-based systems support microwave pulse code modulation and serial spread-spectrum radio modem telemetry. The mobile ground station provides data display and archiving of test activities, air-ground communications between experimenters and the flight test crew, and acts as a flight test Differential Global Positioning System base station. The success of the systems indicates that functional telemetry capabilities can be established for small flight test programs at modest cost.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper discusses using the CAN (Control Area Network) Bus protocol for control and status of flight test data acquisition systems. The application of the CAN (Control Area Network) on an F/A-18 aircraft will be discussed in detail.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / A real-time telemetry simulator of the IUS spacecraft has recently entered operation to train Flight Control Teams for the 1aunch of the AXAF telescope from the Shuttle. The simulator has proven to be a successful higher fidelity implementation of its predecessor, while affirming the rapid development methodology used in its design. Although composed of COTS hardware and software, the system simulates the full breadth of the mission: Launch, Pre-Deployment-Checkout, Burn Sequence, and AXAF/IUS separation. Realism is increased through patching the system into the operations facility to simulate IUS telemetry, Shuttle telemetry, and the Tracking Station link (commands and status message).

The rising cost of military aircraft has driven the DoD to increase the utilization of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components in new acquisitions. Despite several demonstrated advantages of COTS-based systems, challenges relating to obsolescence arise when attempting to design and sustain such systems using traditional acquisition processes. This research addresses these challenges through the creation of an Agile Systems Engineering framework that is specifically aimed at COTS-based systems. This framework, known as the Cyber-physical Acquisition Strategy for COTS-based Agility-Driven Engineering (CASCADE), amends the traditional systems engineering process through the addition of an "identification phase" during which requirements are balanced against the capabilities of commercially-available components. The CASCADE framework motivates the creation of a new Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation which enables the creation of optimum obsolescence mitigation plans. Using this CASCADE MILP formulation, two sets of experiments are carried out: First, verification experiments demonstrate that the CASCADE MILP conforms to expected trends and agrees with existing results. Next, the CASCADE MILP is applied to a representative set of COTS-based systems in order to determine the appropriate level of obsolescence forecast accuracy, and to uncover new system-level cost-vs-reliability trends associated with COTS component modification.