Planning, Implementing, and Executing Test Campaigns with the New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T): The Firesat + Example

The New Observation Strategies Testbed (NOS-T) provides a computational platform to test, evaluate, and mature enabling technology for new Earth-observing mission concepts. NOS-T is built on an event-driven architecture where information can be shared among user-developed applications in real time via notifications of changes in state. This paper describes how a NOS-T test campaign can be developed to explore mission architectures for observing wildfires. The scenario requires four applications to model fire ignitions, a constellation of satellites for detecting fires, ground stations for receiving reports of detected fires, and a visual “scoreboard” to provide face validity and communicate observing scenarios. Test case execution results measure the distributions of fire detection and reporting time for alternative mission architectures.