Sharing Telemetry across Organizations and Systems

The XTCE (XML Telemetric and Command Exchange) standard provides a way to describe space mission telemetry and command "databases" (or dictionaries) to be exchanged across centers and space agencies. Having a standard format for describing the telemetry and command formats allows for the development or adoption of compatible tools and significantly reduces the amount of custom software development often needed to ensure all system components have access to consistent format definitions. The main objective of this paper is to show how powerful XTCE is in terms of interoperability across organizations. This paper summarizes work which entailed converting the mission telemetry database for a current NASA mission, in XTCE format, into several target mission operation databases associated with different telemetry and command toolchains, and then, comparing the results of the telemetry processing and display. The target toolchains selected were Ball Aerospace/COSMOS, NASA-GSFC/ITOS (Goddard Space Flight Center/Integrated Test and Operations System), and NASA-AMMOS/AMPCS (Advanced Multi-Mission Operations System/Mission Data Processing and Control System) - all real-time telemetry and command processing systems.