IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REMOTE OPERATIONS

The communications scenario for support of the Columbus Orbital Facili ty (COF) operations led to the definition of an Interconnection Ground Subnetwork (IGS) to serve as the baseline communications infrastructu re for flight operations for all manned spaceflight elements. This IGS communications support concept has been re-examined in the light of n ew requirements associated with the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) a nd the optimisation possibilities have been re-investigated. The imple mentation as now planned will combine existing common network resource s, services and management functions with requirements to minimise har dware investments, the cost of the links, and the number of staff need ed for communications operations. The concept for this revised communi cations network supporting remote decentralised payload operations has already been successfully demonstrated during the Atlas-2, IML-2 and Atlas-3 Spacelab missions. This article describes the infrastructure i tself and reports on the results achieved during those Spacelab missio ns as a step towards the efficient operation of experiments aboard Int ernational Space Station Alpha (ISSA).