COMMERCIAL-OFF-THE-SHELF TELEMETRY FRONT-END PROTOTYPING

The only way to achieve NASA's goals of "faster, better, cheaper" is to get more well-defined standards in place to allow system integration to be done with plug-and-play components configured from standard, vendor provided options. This has been done with LAN and WAN data links, network equipment and distributed applications, and similar concepts can be applied to space. COTS products are available and can be configured to meet satellite front-end requirements. However, the configuration and integration process still requires extensive customization due to the wide range of different spacecraft data formats front-end configurations and interfaces to applications.