Ground Enterprise Management System, Phase II

Emergent Space Technologies Inc. proposes to develop the Ground Enterprise Management System (GEMS) for spacecraft ground systems. GEMS will provide situational awareness for distributed ground systems, and an understanding of how events and automated actions impact the system in real-time. Recent software advancements have improved sustainability, extensibility, fault tolerance, and ease of automation for ground systems. These traits are important for NASA's missions, from Exploration to Earth and Space Science, but can pose challenges, especially when the system has a high degree of interoperability and communications between components that isn't visible to the end-user. Operators can quickly become overwhelmed with the increased complexity of software components constantly exchanging data and the volumes of information being passed around behind-the-scenes. In fact, for largely distributed systems, as much "situational awareness" is needed for the ground system as for the spacecraft itself. GEMS will provide a centralized integration framework that is needed to provide operators with transparency into the ground system, its state, and its component interactions. GEMS will enhance plug-and-play integrations while providing information management and system coordination. The innovation that enables GEMS is the development of "data-driven" algorithms and software adapters that gather data from the various components of the ground system to construct a data model that captures the system state, organizes the data, and displays it to the mission operators.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.