NASA NTRS2006
To date very little effort has been made to provide interoperability between various space agency projects. To effectively get to the Moon and beyond systems must interoperate. To provide interoperability, standardization and registries of various technologies will be required. These registries will be created as they relate to space flight. With the new NASA Moon/Mars initiative, a requirement to standardize and control the naming conventions of very disparate systems and technologies is emerging. The need to provide numbering to the many processes, schemas, vehicles, robots, space suits and technologies (e.g. versions), to name a few, in the highly complex Constellation initiative is imperative. The number of corporations, developer personnel, system interfaces, people interfaces will require standardization and registries on a scale not currently envisioned. It would only take one exception (stove piped system development) to weaken, if not, destroy interoperability. To start, a standardized registry process must be defined that allows many differing engineers, organizations and operators the ability to easily access disparate registry information across numerous technological and scientific disciplines. Once registries are standardized the need to provide registry support in terms of setup and operations, resolution of conflicts between registries and other issues will need to be addressed. Registries should not be confused with repositories. No end user data is "stored" in a registry nor is it a configuration control system. Once a registry standard is created and approved, the technologies that should be registered must be identified and prioritized. In this paper, we will identify and define a registry process that is compatible with the Constellation initiative and other non related space activities and organizations. We will then identify and define the various technologies that should use a registry to provide interoperability. The first set of technologies will be those that are currently in need of expansion namely the assignment of satellite designations and the process which controls assignments. Second, we will analyze the technologies currently standardized under the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) banner. Third, we will analyze the current CCSDS working group and Birds of a Feather (BoF) activities to ascertain registry requirements. Lastly, we will identify technologies that are either currently under the auspices of another standards body or technologies that are currently not standardized. For activities one through three, we will provide the analysis by either discipline or technology with rationale, identification and brief description of requirements and precedence. For activity four, we will provide a list of current standards bodies e.g. IETF and a list of potential candidates.