Ses Americom, Inc.

General Electric Company

Thomas Gerard Nowak

Kevin John Moscatiello

Christopher Taylor

Anthony William Massaro

John Philip Schramm

John Erik Hershey

Mark Lewis Grabb

John Anderson Ross

Vincent Paul Staudinger

Nicholas Vespasian Chilelli

Michael Pritchard

Henry White

Manoj K Chauhan

Namita Joshi

Jeffrey Thomas Watts

John Phillip Schrumm

Ganesh Subramaniam

Srinivasan Ranganathan

Winfield A Caldwell, Iii

An N-Tiered enterprise and/or N-Tiered Web-based enterprise system and methods for managing, monitoring, coordinating the procedures of and optionally controlling a fleet of geosynchronous satellites through a distributed network such as the Internet. The system and associated object oriented software architecture seamlessly supports monitoring and analyzing real-time, near real-time, historical/playback, simulated and archived satellite telemetry as well as Tracking, Telemetry and Control (TT&C) ground system generated data products such as real-time alerts, archived alerts and ground system server statuses from a group of legacy distributed TT&C wide area network (WAN) ground station systems located around the world.

System and method of providing N-tiered enterprise/web-based management, procedure coordination, and control of a geosynchronous satellite fleet

A method for monitoring the operation of a spacecraft make telemetry data directly accessible to customers of a satellite services provider over a network. The method may be completely automated at least from the perspective of the provider so that the need for human intervention during telemetry data retrieval and processing is eliminated. This, in turn, will substantially reduce the delays, costs, and inefficiencies associated with conventional telemetry data processing and customer service methods. In one application of the method, helix current data is automatically retrieved, processed, and made accessible at a service provider's website for retrieval by customers. The website may be password-protected for security purposes. If desired, telemetry data may be provided on the website on a real-time or near real-time basis. The method may advantageously be integrated into a customer service management model for a satellite service provider in order to streamline efficiency and reduce costs.

System and method for providing automatically processed, network-accessible telemetry data

A ground-control system for a fleet of satellites provides a highly reliable means that automatically recognizes undesirable telemetry state changes and automatically transmits the required commands to the proper satellite to place the satellite operational parameters into the desired state. The ground-control system utilizes hardware, software and two redundant ground-control sites: a Control site and a Monitor site. There may also be a number of disabled sites to replace one of the redundant ground-control sites, at a moment's notice, if necessary. Both redundant sites constantly and independently monitor and verify validity of satellite telemetry. Upon occurrence of an undesired state change (event) upon a particular satellite, ground-control computers at both sites independently recognize the event and automatically begin a response. The control site computer verifies no critical satellite on-board commanding is scheduled to take place, discontinues interruptible activities, directs the monitor site computer to stop any transmission to the event satellite, switches the RF hardware to access the proper satellite and transmits the required commands. If the control site computer cannot interrupt its own activities, it directs the monitor site computer to verify no critical satellite on-board commanding is scheduled to take place and then discontinues interruptible activities to transmit the required commands. If the monitor site computer cannot interrupt activities, it passes the response back to the control site where the control site computer stores the required commands in the queue until activities can be interrupted for the transmission of the required commands.

Automated ground system with telemetry initiated command assistance

A method of coding and compressing telemetry data makes use of the fact that the telemetry frames are typically highly correlated at a distance, .delta., corresponding to commutation or data periodicities. The existence of such periodicity is used to render a portion of each frame to zeros. The next steps are to search for and remove correlations between the bits in a set of frames, denoted {F.sub.i *}. The compression algorithm implementing the method according to the invention has four sub-steps; Data preconditioning, Compression and coding of first frame, F.sub.1, Compression and coding of frames 2-.delta., F.sub.1 -F.sub..delta., and Compression and coding of F.sub..delta.+1 and on, the steady-state mode.

General frame-based compression method

Growing community of inventors

Langhorne, PA, United States of America

Thomas Gerard Nowak