Multimedia Services for Interactive Space-Mission Telescience

U. Christ, K-J. Schulz & H. Engelke

ESA is presently preparing the installation of a ground communications infrastructure to support telescience in the scope of the International Space Station (ISS) and the Columbus Orbital Facility (COF), representing the European contribution. Telescience – or remote science operations – is the remote operation of scientific payloads onboard space platforms. The provision of remote operations capabilities for an experiment platform or laboratory in space imposes high safety, reliability and security requirements on the supporting communications system. These requirements are met by the Interconnection Ground Subnetwork (IGS), an ESA-provided autonomous Intranet with gateways to the secure networks of other space agencies. The main objective is to provide scientists with a ‘virtual presence’ at the experiment workplace in space.

This article focuses on new technologies, which enable and license scientists with limited requirements (e.g. for data availability and access reliability) to operate an experiment in space at minimum communications costs. Additionally, the proposed architectural concept uncovers an access to real-time space events for everyone on the World Wide Web (WWW), which is a significant public relations amplifier. The article describes how multimedia technologies could, already now, support tele-operations of experiments in space and reports on the results of a study in this field conducted by ESA along with an industrial team. An outlook for future service and application developments is also given.