As of today, the increasingly high number of flying satellites will make impracticable for Satellite Controllers (SCs) to monitor effectively the health status of satellites, especially in large constellations. The goal of this project is to develop CASTeC (Context Aware Spacecraft Telemetry Checking) as a software tool addressing the need for solutions that are able to support SCs by automatically detecting anomalies, predicting failures and understanding the causes of these events, with a view on the entire satellites constellation.
Therefore, the objective of the CASTeC project is able to attain full validation in an operative scenario (TRL 8) of the following software product capabilities:
The CASTeC project foresees the involvement of alpha customers who will use the tool supporting the demonstration of CASTeC capabilities in an operational scenario.
The key challenges are the following:
With respect to potential existing competing solutions, the benefits of CASTeC are the following:
CASTeC main features are the following:
With CASTeC the user can:
CASTeC is characterised by a typical three tier architecture composed by:
The product is intended to be a software module that can be easily interfaced with Ground Segment operations platforms.
The web-based Human Machine Interface implementation allows the installation of CASTeC on a shared (or external) machine and the investigation of the telemetry from any different location, through a web browser.
CASTeC can be used as standalone tool or integrated with other end users’ tools, through specific APIs, according to their needs.
The following figure represents an example of CASTeC integration with the Ground Segment.
The project comprises the following phases and milestone (MS):
The project foresees the upgrade of CASTeC from a software for automatic telemetry checking of a single satellite to a software able to check an entire constellation of satellites with enhanced algorithms and visualisation tools. CASTeC is currently classified as TRL 4 (partial prototype) and the goal is to reach TRL 8 (validated product in an operational scenario).
The project is currently under the Definition Phase: the software requirements, along with the technical specification and the demonstration scenario are under definition. Two end users are involved in this process and continuous feedback is collected.