Django as a Mission Planning Tool Interface for the CYGNSS Mission

The successful operation of spacecraft requires careful planning. Each mission comes with a unique set of challenges that must be met by tools and techniques developed on a mission-specific basis. In the past, these tools have been created as Command Line Interfaces (CLIs), Remote Command Line Interfaces (Remote CLIs), or Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). This paper presents a method for the development of these custom tools implemented for the mission planning of the CYGNSS (Cyclone Global Navigation Space System) mission: using the Django web framework to act as a remote Graphical User Interface. CYGNSS, the NASA Earth Venture Class mission which launched in late 2016, is a constellation of eight microsatellites in low Earth orbit which perform ocean wind speed measurements using reflected GPS signals to aid in weather modeling. Several tools have been developed to aid in the extensive and ongoing workload in mission planning. Now operating in the extended mission phase, the CYGNSS team is small. However, each team-member works on several projects aside from CYGNSS and performs the necessary mission planning and operations from their individual computer. Since, when using traditional tools, each operator's computer generally has a different combination of hardware, software, and operating system, developers are often required to perform custom installation and debugging for each new user of the system. This results in a system which is prone to user-specific bugs, and is not suitable for the low-cost environment in which CYGNSS operates. We present a method which alleviates these problems. We use Django, a Python-based website framework, to host a suite of mission planning tools on a local website. This framework is split into three components: the Object Relational Mapping (ORM), the Template, and the View. The Django ORM is used to access the backend database from Python. Django Templates are used to control how the tool is displayed to the end user. Django Views tie the previous two components together by taking a request from the user, retrieving data from the database, rendering a template using that data, and returning the rendered template to the user where it is displayed by a web browser. We show how each of these components is used and the benefits of using such a web based system over a traditional tool.