User Home Bases (UHBs)

In addition, for specific experiment operations, dedicated User Home Bases (UHBs) are set up if required. UHBs, which are the 'home' locations of the scientists, are typically national institutes (e.g. universities), who need to set-up the adequate communication and data processing infrastructures that allow real-time data monitoring and control of the respective experiments (e.g. for remote operations). The establishment and verification of UHBs will typically be done on an Increment basis. The USOCs coordinate and support this setup, and are the focal point for the operations preparation activities for the UHB, in particular for the definition of experiment operations requirements, the specifications of hardware and software, and the connectivity requirements of the UHB to the ISS ground segment.

Apart from its defined technical and operational responsibilities resulting from the assignment to a payload, a USOC - as a national institution - also forms a user information centre for national users to which central information is supplied by the Erasmus Centre (EC) at ESA-ESTEC Noordwijk. In this context, a USOC contributes to the identification and familiarisation of potential user groups, with the objective to attract more scientific and commercial users to the ISS.

USOC assignments

The following table summarises the USOCs (FRCs and FSCs only) and their current assignment of facilities:

USOC tasks and responsibilities

The tasks for which the USOCs are responsible can be summarised as follows:

• Facility and Experiment operations preparation, validation, and execution;
• Payload increment planning and inputs to the overall Mission/Increment/Partner plan;
• Operations feasibility and science samples bread-boarding with the Scientific Reference Model (SRM), collecting science requirements for experiment and payload upgrades;
• Scientific experiment preparation and operation validation on SRM/EM (Engineering Model) including validation of payload increment timelines, increment procedures and payload data base;
• Consolidated planning in coordination with Industry for ground model utilisation (SRM/EM/EGSE) for increment preparation;
• Provision of science/sample based parts to experiment safety data packages, experiment qualification and validation testing, experiment ground and launch site processing;
• Update of the Payload Operations Data File (PODF), operations scenarios with associated centres (FSCs, ESCs and UHBs), validation and interface testing of ground segment (in particular with the Columbus Control Centre (Col-CC), FSCs/ESCs/UHBs), experiment ground operations products for launch items;
• Experiment training requirements and procedures, astronaut training support for experiment operations (including instructors), familiarisation of scientists;
• Ground rules and constraints, issue of planning and re-planning requests, inputs to short-term-plan, timeline and ground data flows;
• Realtime operations management and re-planning for payload and experiment execution, payload team co-ordination, flight anomalies reporting, console logs, payload data processing, ground based (parallel) experiments on SRM/EM;
• Early retrieval and late access activities, configuration control of experiment ground models (e.g. ground experiment containers), SRM configuration control.