Ground Systems Engineering

Emergent is leveraging its experience in Information Technology to provide next-generation ground system solutions that reduce cost through integration, situational awareness, and automation. Emergent provides specialized support for evaluating, prototyping, and benchmarking new technologies to help missions perform more effective assessments of the range of available solutions.   Emergent will use a mix of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), government off-the-shelf (COTS), free and open-source (FOSS), and custom applications to construct ground systems that best meet the needs of our customers.  Some of the major sub-systems that Emergent has developed and/or integrated include the following:

• Telemetry and Command Systems
• Planning & Scheduling Systems
• Orbit Determinations Systems
• Flight Dynamics Systems
• Trending & Analysis Systems
• Automation
• Situational Awareness

Multi-Mission Operations Centers

Emergent has developed technologies that are multi-mission capable and has been a crucial team member to re-engineer a set of independently operated Small Explorer (SMEX) missions into a single Multi-Mission Operations Center (MMOC). This task was accomplished with the GSFC Mission Services Evolution Center (GMSEC) middleware-based ground system architecture. Emergent is identifying and proving new technologies demonstrated in other domains and is applying them to problems and short-comings that today’s missions struggle with.

Situational Awareness Toolkit in AMMOS Catalog

GEMS has been selected as the situational awareness toolkit for the Advanced Multi-Mission Operations System (AMMOS) catalog that is managed by the Multi-mission Ground System and Services (MGSS) office at NASA JPL.  The AMMOS catalog is a comprehensive list of software and services JPL can provide for the entire lifecycle of a flight project or an experiment.  Emergent is looking to support the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), or Curiosity, rover to monitor their telemetry system, the health of its middleware, and the status of its ground system with GEMS.

ANSR to the Rescue

Under budget pressure, NASA missions are reducing staffing levels in many mission operations centers. Emergent's alert notification system (ANSR) has come to the rescue in this new lower cost operations paradigm by providing paging support for the TERRA spacecraft--the flagship of NASA's Earth Observing System. ANSR is also supporting TRMM, SMEX, ST-5 and GLAST.