CSC Provides Flawless Support for NASA Space Missions

CSC brings technical expertise and experience to every client engagement, including NASA, a valued customer for more than four decades. Since 1989, a team of CSC experts has provided software and engineering support for more than a dozen unmanned spacecraft missions, achieving a flawless track record while saving NASA money. One of the secrets behind this success is an innovative management approach that takes advantage of the vast experience and knowledge of CSC’s technical staff.

Effective and reliable Flight Software (FSW) is critical to the success of every space mission. FSW is a unique application that controls a spacecraft, interfaces with every spacecraft subsystem and allows communications with the ground. CSC’s Multi-Mission FSW (MMFSW) team has provided sustained engineering support for 15 orbiting spacecraft. These include the Hubble Space Telescope and weather and research satellites such as the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite. The team takes a proactive approach to supporting the entire life of space missions, from pre-launch development to re-entry, and everything in between.

The Hubble Space Telescope is one of many spacecraft supported by CSC. (Photo courtesy NASA)

No room for error

CSC’s engineering work is wide ranging, involving vital tasks such as flight and simulator software maintenance, configuration management, mission trend analysis and documentation. NASA relies on the team’s deep knowledge and experience in areas such as software design and architecture. These skills help improve the maintainability of spacecraft, thereby extending the life of missions and generating substantial cost savings for the agency.

In addition, the MMFSW team prides itself on being able to respond promptly to spacecraft emergencies. For example, in 2006, they helped NASA come up with a quick software fix to repair a camera on the Hubble that had stopped working.

Space travel success requires technical perfection and NASA strives to achieve what it calls a "zero error rate." Annie Chien, a CSC senior program manager overseeing the MMFSW team, describes the importance of eliminating all technical errors. "One mistake could bring down the whole satellite," she says, adding that a conservative estimate for a lost spacecraft is $300 million. Some satellites are worth as much as $1 billion. The ability to develop innovative software solutions is essential because many of NASA’s spacecraft were launched many years ago and have relatively old technology onboard. "In space, you cannot fix a hardware problem, so we use software as a workaround," Chien says.

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By nature, multi-mission work requires prudent tactical planning. Under Chien’s leadership, the team takes an innovative management approach by blending vertical and horizontal business models. "Each mission has multiple staff members, and each staff member works on multiple missions," she says. As part of the vertical model, team members are cross-trained across multiple missions, which saves NASA manpower costs. On the horizontal end of the equation, dedicated staff members oversee processes across all missions and team members’ assignments are constantly reevaluated.

This approach allows highly specialized technical experts to move fluidly from one mission to the next, dealing promptly with specific issues or unexpected anomalies. The MMFSW team also has a technical lead to identify similarities between each mission and a process engineer to streamline processes across missions. "We gain knowledge and develop best processes that we can share between missions, and we also learn the best way to do business from mission to mission," says Chien.

Delivering quality and value

Elaine Shell, NASA’s Branch Head, Flight Software, praises the efforts of the MMSFW team. She says CSC delivers "very good value" to NASA. "Quality is represented by the fact that we have had no on-orbit problems resulting from software support on approximately 10 missions," Shell says.

CSC technical lead Bob Koehler’s multifaceted role on the MMFSW team serves as a good example of how talent is leveraged across multiple missions. In addition to the Hubble, Koehler has been instrumental in the development of software for the Burst Alert Telescope for NASA’s Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, as well as Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to take flight in 2013.

In addition to achieving a flawless track record, CSC’s engineering team has helped NASA provide numerous public benefits. These include developing a software fix for a hardware problem on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite, which generated timely and accurate hurricane predictions in 2005, the year Hurricanes Katrina and Rita wreaked havoc on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The team also provides support to NASA satellites that gather invaluable scientific information about the earth’s environment, atmospheric events and the origin of the universe.