Klaus Botschen Softwareengineering

During this time, I was involved in the acceptance, qualification, integration and system test preparation for SATCOMBw, a communication satellite for the Deutsche Bundeswehr. This included the creation of test procedures and the mapping to the system requirements.

The SATCOM-Bw project required a SCOS-2000 MIB database editor for telemetry, command and command sequences, for packet, calibration and parameter structure.

The editor is designed and written completely in JAVA utilizing the Eclipse RCP environment, and uses EJBs to store and retrieve the data from a Postgres database.

The editor provides multiple views, hierarchical and flat navigation, complex data integrity and update checks and version management. In addition to design, implementation and test of the software, I wrote the user- and administration manual.

The TerraSAR-X offline processing which was based on the SCOS-2000 tool chain, had insufficient performance for the operational constraints of the satellite mission.

Therefore, based on the SATCOM-Bw Frame Converter, I designed and implemented a Telemetry Processor which was able to speed up the processing of the Satellite Telemetry by a factor of 10.

The TM Processor reads the TM stream and the result specification from files, decodes packets, extracts parameters, performs calibration, and creates the required tabular results.

The software is written in C++ on a multi-threaded framework with socket I/O and has a Web frontend for status and control.

The SATCOM-Bw Frame Converter is a TM/TC/Admin packet processing software with SCOS- and NCTRS proxy interfaces, a frame processing unit, Packet Generation, DUMP file extraction, Archiving and Retrieval stages. The software is designed to be run as server daemon and has a secure HTTP interface for administration and configuration.

I designed and implemented the complete software in C++ using a multi-threaded message driven architecture.

Additionally I analysed the Spacebus 3000 TM transfer frame and worked out ways to decompose the TM frames into CCSDS space packets compatible with SCOS 2000.

During this time, I was involved in several SCOS related projects and tests:

One project was to investigate the internal processing of SCOS packets with variable length, and to propose solutions for having the content of Variable Packets being displayed in the Monitoring Desktop Application of SCOS. The project included a test software for injecting Space Packets to SCOS, and the creation of a corresponding SCOS MIB.

For TerraSAR-X offline processing, I designed and implemented a SCOS-2000 TMPprint supervisor utility that manages the invocation and activity of several TMPprint processes. Additionally, I investigated the possibility to directly process the TM dump stream and created a test setup for reading TM dump files and injecting the TM stream into a packet extraction and processing software.

Together with TU München I worked on a high speed CCSDS packet processing setup. My part was to implement a software that does packet extraction from TM transfer frames, packet filtering and splitting into different TM streams, where one of these TM streams is fed into SCOS. The task included a TM Simulator and a small SCOS TM MIB.

The software for all three projects is written in C++ on a multi-threaded framework with socket I/O and has a Web frontend for status and control.

Some people of the LSE staff needed ORACLE knowledge. I prepared and hold a 4 day training course, and perfomed a multiple instance database installation for hands on experience in ORACLE Database administration, configuration and PL/SQL usage.

LSE routinely trains new operators on SCOS 2000, the Satellite Control and Operations System of ESA. In order to have more flexibility, a SCOS Trainings Center was set up.

This project included the installation and configuration of a SCOS server and several clients, and a Satellite Simulator which generates Housekeeping Telemetry and intercepts Telecommands via the NCTRS interface of SCOS.

The Ground Operator Control Team needed a database front end for performing frequent complex database queries. The software was written in JAVA in close co-operation with the Columbus Flight Team.

RAMSES and SCOS are two fundamentally different Monitoring and Control Systems. On request of the Swedish Space Corporation I wrote an interface handler software for their "Rocket and Multi Satellite EGSE System" to SCOS 2000. The design of the software was driven by requirement for flexible handling of high peak load without loss of packets.

The Columbus Training and Simulation Team needed a Web-based collaboration tool to allow the different Simulation Teams to plan, manage and execute their simulations.

This project included the MySQL database and the project related table structure design and a PHP framework for input processing and HTML generation.

During this time I have been involved in the integration of the Columbus Flight Segment Monitor and Control System into the Columbus Control Center in Oberpfaffenhofen.

This task involved the role as test observer during the Factory Acceptance Test of the EADS-ST MCS software, installation and test of the EADS-ST Columbus MCS system and integration into the Col-CC infrastructure (Server and Client Installations, integration with the Storage Area Network environment, trouble shooting the installation and making repairs/installing patches as required).

During this time I made investigations into SCOS 2000 and its use for the Columbus and CHAMP missions.

A major task of this work was to perform a data structure analysis of the Columbus Mission Database (several hundreds of tables in a Oracle 9 database system) and to convert the telemetry and command configuration to the SCOS-2000 database format.

One result from this effort was a Java-based database browser which now supports the Columbus Flight Control Team and the Space Operations Personnel.

2002-2008