A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PLAN FOR EASIER ACCESS, MANAGEMENT, AND ANALYSTS OF SCIENCE DATA

NASA's COST LESS Team is pursuing strategies to reduce the cost and co mplexity of planning and executing space missions. The team's technica l goal is to reverse the trend of constructing unique solutions for si milar problems. To this end, the team is exploring-ways to represent m ission functionality in terms of building blocks and is discovering ap proaches that could accommodate the same building blocks for seemingly disparate activities, such as organizing processed telemetry data, co ntrolling onboard experiments, searching science archives, reducing an d presenting information to science users, and supporting educational outreach. Reusable object technology (UOT), a research undertaking by the authors, is showing promise in recognizing similarities in functio ns which were previously viewed as unique because they appeared in dif ferent programs or mission phases. Since UOT is aimed at being impleme ntation independent (i.e. the function performed could be accomplished manually, by an automated process, by a specialized instrument, etc.) , no premature judgment for automation or autonomy need be made. In th is paper, the authors attempt to strike a balance between theory and r eality as they describe UOT, including its beginnings, its underpinnin g, its utility, and its potential for achieving substantive reductions in cost and complexity for the Agency's space programs. The authors d iscuss their collaboration with the Center for EUV Astrophysics, Unive rsity of California, Berkeley to reduce the cost and complexity of sci ence investigations. Their multi-disciplinary plan incorporates both U OT and a complementary technology introduced in this paper, called int eractive archives. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rig hts reserved