Supported Projects
Earth Observing - 1 (EO-1)
EO-1 was the first New Millennium Program (NMP) Earth observing mission, and was designed to demonstrate new technologies in orbit, such as the Light-Weight Flexible Solar Array, Enhanced Formation Flying, the Pulsed Plasma Thruster, and the X-Band Phased Array Antenna. EO-1 was planned as a one-year mission, but has been operating continuously since its launch in November 2000. In the extended mission, additional technologies have been validated on board, including the On-board Cloud Cover Detection software and the Autonomous Science Experiment (ASE) software.
the Hammers Company, Inc. was responsible for designing, developing and testing the attitude control system (ACS) flight software, and the attitude control electronics (ACE) flight software before launch. After launch, the Hammers Company, Inc. has been responsible for maintenance of all flight software on the Command & Data Handling (C&DH) processor (including the ACS software), and the ACE software. The Hammers Company is also responsible for maintenance of the flight software development lab located at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Besides the flight software, the Hammers Company, Inc. also provided a VirtualSat spacecraft simulator for the EO-1 mission. This was the first use of the VirtualSat simulator for flight software development and testing. Spacecraft models (of hardware and of spacecraft dynamics and disturbances) were developed as components, the ACS flight software was written within the VirtualSat environment on a desktop PC, giving flight software developers, algorithm developers, and testers immediate feedback as they wrote code, models, and test procedures. A hardware-configuration of VirtualSat was provided to the flight software lab to allow the models to be used when the flight software executed on an external processor. In the hardware configuration, VirtualSat mimicked the behavior of several on-board Remote Service Nodes (RSNs), as well as modeled the spacecraft environment. The VirtualSat simulator was also connected to the spacecraft for testing of various components, and for launch/operations simulations.
Two additional VirtualSat systems were developed after launch and provided to JPL and GSFC to support the ASE development.
