Solving the Long-term Support Problem - Migrating Operational Mission Control Systems to SCOS-2000

The long duration of many missions means that the cost and risk of supporting their Mission Control Systems (MCS), whose initial development may have started five years or more before launch, may increase steadily with time. This is accentuated for families of missions where each new spacecraft is based on an update of the original. Changes in the marketplace may mean that the hardware, operating system or COTS baseline for the system become obsolete. Hardware and software maintenance can become prohibitively expensive, and while freezing the MCS may seem an attractive short-term solution for reducing cost, on-board failures, or mission re-scoping, particularly near the end of life, mean extensive changes to the MCS can be required. A pre-emptive approach to managing these risks is to initiate a migration to a new state-of-the-art MCS. Under contract to the European Space Agency (ESA), LogicaCMG has helped ESA address the issue of long term MCS support by migrating several ESA operational control systems to ESA’s Sun/UNIX based SCOS-2000 infrastructure, as well as several other more minor migrations involving a change of hardware platform and operating system version. This paper looks at the key issues associated with performing migrations, in particular: what is the long term support problem, and why is there potentially a need to migrate an operational mission control system identifying the correct approach to take for the migration looking at the rationale for choosing ESA’s SCOS-2000 infrastructure as the target platform for migration executing the migration process – and some of the typical technical issues encountered the final steps needed to “go live”.