How to design an award winning satellite control system for any planet.
Disclaimer: I’ve never designed a satellite control system. But I do like dreaming big and planning. So — if one wanted to do this, a good place to start would be NASA’s Software Design award.
Someone would need to nominate the design per NASA’s website. A good candidate project for this would be NASA’s Open Mission Control Technologies MCT. It is “developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is being used by NASA for data analysis of spacecraft missions, as well as planning and operation of experimental rover systems”, according to their website.
Another outcome that might help if it was nominated for sharing in a venue like Amazon re:mars such as Major Tom from Xplore was.
Finally, an academic or industry paper on arXiv might not hurt.
All together, this type of venture might take about 3–4 years, realistically. This is assuming it takes a year to learn the domain, another year to ship a a new product, and then NASA actually using the product. Obviously a lot of variables are in play here.
Where would one start their requirements gathering for this design? Let’s take to an answer from an AI enabled chat bot in a previous post:
