Open Source Mission Control for the Chrome Browser

Jay Trimble, a member of the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center, discusses Open Source Mission Control for the Chrome Browser as part of the Google Talks series.
Space missions in their many forms, from robotic surrogates that extend our senses farther than they’ve ever been, to crewed missions that extend human presence into the solar system, all depend, to varying degrees, on ground-based mission control. Bounded by the speed of light, mission control interacts with people and spacecraft as a partner in enabling exploration. Pioneered by Chris Kraft and his team at the dawn of the space age, the core concepts of mission control are largely unchanged since we took those first steps on the Moon. New technology, however, presents the possibility to evolve mission control, giving us new capabilities and flexibility in how we plan and execute missions.

WARP (Web Applications for Resource Prospector) a new open source toolset for mission visualization, brings mission control to the Chrome Web Browser. WARP design, driven by the Resource Prospector Lunar Mission and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s deep space missions, is a generalized model for space operations, providing distributed situational awareness for mission decisions from anywhere. WARP integrates multiple data sources into a coherent visualization toolset from which users may assemble their own software, breaking down the “old” paradigm of traditional mission control disciplines and applications. This frees us to operate based on mission needs, rather than constraints enforced by software application boundaries.