The Triana Mission-next generation systems architecture ready for flight

NASA's Triana Mission is the first to take full advantage of the powerful capabilities offered by modern digital electronics and comprehensive software architecture. Not only is the performance of these miniature systems well beyond that of their bulky predecessors, but the time to configure them for a particular mission has been dramatically reduced as well. As a result, the cost of these implementations is just a fraction of previous missions. This deep space Earth and solar science platform touts highly autonomous, 3-axis stabilized performance for only $77M. In just 21 months time, the Triana observatory will have gone from conceptual design to flight readiness, being launched by the Space Transportation System (STS) in early 2001. After deployment in LEO, Triana will boost itself into a trajectory to the L1 libration point approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. There it will make observations of space weather, Earth climatic behavior, and whole Earth radiometry. The budget includes the development of the spacecraft, 5 scientific instruments, deployable booms and solar arrays, a hydrazine propulsion module, a new upper stage system based on the Thiokol Star-48 kick motor, all that goes with launching from the manned STS, and 2 years of continuous mission operations and scientific data analysis. This paper describes the novel approach taken to implement this mission, commenting on the technical architecture as well as the processes used. Experiences to date on the development status are also discussed.