Database administration for spacecraft operations - The integral experience

ESA's flight control teams have always used databases for spacecraft monito ring and control. The mission control systems rely on a database to interfa ce with the spacecraft, in order to know how to encode the telecommands sen t and interpret the telemetry received. This approach allows the control sy stem software and the data describing the controlled domain to be decoupled . Given the number of changes typically implemented in a database prior to and even after launch, no other approach would be feasible. The population, validation and configuration control of the spacecraft data base therefore play an important role in mission pre-launch activities. Exp erience shows that a reliable database is possibly the most fundamental pre requisite for the successful execution of spacecraft operations.