Innovations and Technological Advances in Support of Cost-sustainability of NOAA’s Future Ground/Flight System Architectures

NOAA recognizes the need for future expansion and scalability to receive, ingest, process, and distribute ever-growing streams of data. This growth in data volume is coming from current and increasingly new sources, including diverse missions of opportunities from national and international partners, and both government and commercial sources. The complexity of exploitation methods is increasing along with the number of satellites generating additional data to be processed. NESDIS is shifting its space-based Earth observation architecture toward lower-cost, smaller satellites, with shorter lifespans than the current NOAA satellite fleet. This shift in remote-sensing in turn necessitates higher agility in the ground processing infrastructure to reconfigure assets, based on quality and health of the overall satellite systems, as quantifiably demonstrated through studies and objective analysis. Building that more-agile ground system requires NESDIS to consider adopting new technologies and novel concepts. The NESDIS Office of System Architecture and Engineering (SAE) is experimenting with innovations and technological advances to help deliver cost-effective and sustainable ground architectures that support NOAA’s future satellite operations. These innovations and technological advances may include new generations of satellite systems, extended automations in operations and Command and Control, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning (AI/ML/DL) capabilities across the value chain, and end to end cloud migration.

In this visionary paper, we will describe aspirational and innovative concepts and technologies on "What is Next" in Constellation Mission Operations. These may include advances already in the pipeline on multimission fleet management, observatory management and analysis, trends of sensor and spacecraft State-of-Health, monitoring of instrument and spacecraft payload telemetry, and anomaly monitoring and resolution using AI/M/DLL. The paper will also make the case for a hybrid command interface that links government managed ground operations smoothly to commercially operated Command and Control services.