CLEO and VMOC: enabling warfighters to task space payloads

CLEO, the Cisco router in low Earth orbit, is a secondary experimental payload onboard the UK-DMC disaster-monitoring consortium remote-sensing small satellite built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). That router in space, its mobile networking capabilities, and the satellite's imaging capabilities have been proven as part of a demonstration and evaluation of VMOC, the Virtual Mission Operations Center, a joint US governmental/DoD initiative using Nautilus Horizon software from General Dynamics. The combination of the CLEO and VMOC initiatives together provides a framework to define, test, and field a 'system of systems' based on the Internet protocol (IP), capable of supporting secure distributed mission operations of IP-based platforms and sensors. VMOC is an Internet-enabled secure application that provides a user-friendly interface which enables both trained and untrained operators in the field to access database satellite imagery, and allows users to task and command space assets. VMOC receives live telemetry from the UK-DMC satellite via multiple Internet-enabled ground stations and uses high-order, emerging Internet standards for Web services to request SSTL's own mission planning system schedule Earth images to be taken by the UK-DMC satellite. VMOC accesses the CLEO router onboard the UK-DMC satellite via SSTL's own ground station in Guildford, UK, and via Universal Space Network's ground station at North Pole, AK. The primary VMOC server is located in the AF Center for Research Support (CERES) on Schriever AFB, CO, with a backup VMOC server located at NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio. The home agent for mobile routing to CLEO through any ground station, providing a permanent point of contact for access, is also located at NASA Glenn. For the demonstration, the Army Space Support Element Toolset was deployed to Vandenberg AFB, CA, which served as the field location and Internet access site during testing and evaluation of VMOC and CLEO. We describe VMOC and the CLEO router in orbit. We summarize the Vandenberg demonstration and the metrics on which VMOC was evaluated, as well as ongoing testing. We also describe how shared use of the Internet protocol, IP, allowed this demonstration to successfully use and leverage existing equipment and infrastructure across the Internet that was not originally intended for this purpose, bringing a user application, a satellite and a router in space together to meet the needs of net-centric operations.