The New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS‐T) is a digital engineering environment for enabling distributed space mission (DSM) technology demonstrations. Its event‐driven architecture enables users to orchestrate DSM test campaigns by developing applications that communicate state changes via messages. NOS‐T is motivated by requirements such as geographical distribution, cross‐boundary participation, wide applicability, and usability that make it unique in this field. This article introduces NOS‐T and describes its architecture in the context of an example DSM test suite, FireSat+. The scalability of NOS‐T is demonstrated with a performance assessment of its capabilities under a stress test of high message frequency and payload size, which are both related to the complexity of potential user‐generated test cases. Results show that message periodicity has no significant effect on median delay time over the ranges sampled; however, the message payload size induces linear growth in median delay time of approximately 1.5 ms per kB. Future NOS‐T applications can adjust the execution time scaling factor and message payload size to match operational constraints on allowable delay.

This study attempts to demonstrate how value-based priority algorithms can be used to make cost-efficient decisions on tasking commercial satellite providers for Earth observation imagery. Despite the availability of Earth imaging increasing regularly from commercial providers, these images remain severely underutilized by the Earth science community. Experiments in this paper expand on the need to isolate the value of commercial images to a science mission, as well as simplifying the image provider selection process by comparing optimized value-cost ratios for each provider. Using the New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T), a proposed mission is simulated and defined by applications populated with provider-specific data, then paired with a user-defined value function. The NOS-T Tools library provides a set of pre-defined applications modelling satellites, satellite constellations, ground stations, and generic science events that can be used to create a distributed model of a proposed mission, and components such as individual providers can be implemented to better understand impact of images on earth science research. By developing a method to maximize the value of a image while minimizing cost, this paper offers a means of expanding the data available to the earth science community and increasing interfacing between the public and private sectors.

Technological advances have enabled new types of distributed space missions (DSMs) that can improve the data resolution along many dimensions over monolithic, "flagship" spacecraft. Future DSMs will fuse data from a wide variety of sensors including other spacecraft and various ground- and air-based in situ platforms. The New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T) is a new digital engineering environment based on systems engineering principles for simulating DSMs using a loosely coupled, event-driven architecture that manages communication between logically and geographically distributed user-developed applications. This paper demonstrates how NOS-T can evaluate new operational modes for satellite constellations using real-time stream gauge data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Information System (NWIS) to decrease the latency of targeted spacecraft observations of flooded areas. The test case uses real-time data from NWIS stream gauges in the U.S., artificially triggers a flooding event, subsequently tasks satellite observations, and downlinks data to a ground station. It demonstrates how NOS-T enables the transfer of information between in situ and space-based sensors in a digital engineering environment to aid conceptual design of future DSMs across organizational boundaries.

A new observing strategy for floods was demonstrated and evaluated in a testbed environment. The strategy coordinates several observing platforms, including in situ and space based, to observe a flood from multiple vantage points and dynamically target predicted flood events with high-resolution observations. The coordinated observations were assimilated back into the model to continuously improve forecasts and future observation selection. The demonstration shows the potential for coordinated, model-driven observing strategies and the feasibility of the NOS Testbed for demonstrating and evaluating new observing strategies.

The New Observation Strategies Testbed (NOS-T) provides a computational platform to test, evaluate, and mature enabling technology for new Earth-observing mission concepts. NOS-T is built on an event-driven architecture where information can be shared among user-developed applications in real time via notifications of changes in state. This paper describes how a NOS-T test campaign can be developed to explore mission architectures for observing wildfires. The scenario requires four applications to model fire ignitions, a constellation of satellites for detecting fires, ground stations for receiving reports of detected fires, and a visual “scoreboard” to provide face validity and communicate observing scenarios. Test case execution results measure the distributions of fire detection and reporting time for alternative mission architectures.

The advancing digital engineering landscape generates a need for modern human space exploration logistics planning tools. The goal of the SpaceNet Cloud project is to build a tool to satisfy this need through a dynamic web-based application based on the existing SpaceNet space logistics tool. SpaceNet Cloud condenses the process of organizing, constructing, and analyzing a mission scenario into a user-friendly web-based application. A simplistic interface, coupled with powerful backend capabilities allows SpaceNet Cloud to harness the accessibility of cloud-based computing, creating a modern take on mission logistics. The effectiveness of a user’s mission is clearly defined using an incremental mission outline process, and a clear visualization of demand analysis upon completion. The dynamic nature of the application also allows for rapid prototyping of missions based on final analysis results, and the potential for collaborative design opens opportunities for public and private sectors alike.