Skyteck to Host International Space Station Meeting 15-19th September 2014

Meeting of the International Space Station (ISS) Operations Data File (ODF) and International Procedure Viewer (iPV) Working Groups.

Skytek is one of the participating members of both the ODF and iPV working groups. Skytek has been invited to host a meeting of these groups in Dublin in September 2014. This is a major ‘vote of confidence’ in Skytek and by association the Irish space programme.

The purpose of the meeting is to agree the standards, processes and procedures for all daily activities performed by astronauts on board ISS and the related monitoring of these activities by mission control centres.

The ODF group manages all aspects of operational processes and procedures for Astronauts onboard the International Space Station. Astronauts are required to execute procedures (e.g. Experiments, system maintenance, space walks) on a daily basis while on board the ISS and the ODF group manages these authoring, distribution and execution of these procedures. During the week, there will also be meeting of the working group for the International Procedural Viewer(IPV) system. The iPV working group discusses all aspects of software which supports the standards and processes defined by the ODF members. Skytek are involved in the development of several of these software applications ranging from the core iPV software system through to authoring environments and mobile tablet applications.

Approximately 5 astronauts, supported with members of the astronaut crew offices, in addition to up to 35 key personnel from all the space agencies involved in the ISS will be attending the meeting and giving their feedback on proposed ODF standards and future iPV software suite features.

The meeting will be attended by all partners of the ISS – NASA, ESA, Japanese, Russian and Canadian agencies along with representatives of the major space system integrator Airbus Space and Defence.

The meeting is usually hosted by the various space agencies or the big partners such as Astrium, United Space Alliance.