Ground Software Overview - Old

The main job of ground software is to support launch operations and report/log telemetry from vehicles and payloads. Ground software could also be used to provide input to a vehicle or payload.

The main functions that ground software will need incorporated are:

Telemetry Parsing - telemetry sent to the ground system, whether wireless or wired, needs to be interpreted in the same way it was sent. The vehicle/payload creates a packet with information it wishes to send to the ground and agrees with the ground system on how it is going to send this before flight. The ground system then interprets this information in the way that was agreed upon between the two systems. Without this, we just have a bunch of meaningless 1's and 0's.

Messaging - once information and telemetry is in a useful form, it needs to be sent places where it is requested and needed. This can be as simple as immediately passing off telemetry information, or a more complex system that allows multiple flows of data from multiple sources going to multiple destinations.

Logging - messages and data need to be stored in a non-volatile location. This allows data to be viewed and analyzed later which is invaluable to have in determining failures.

Display/Interface - the information needs to be displayed in a way that is useful to the human operators. This is a very general functionality, but a ground system is only as useful as what information it can make available.

Generally a more versatile system (less hardware dependent) will probably fair better in the field. Using a single ground system for multiple vehicles/payloads would reduce the overall work required for ground support, at the cost of higher initial development to generalize functionality.