HIVE: HYPER-INTELLIGENT VEHICLE ENHANCEMENT

CLIENT

hypergiant galactic systems

CONTRIBUTION

USER EXPERIENCE, ART DIRECTION

TEAM

JOHN POWELL, ADRIAN GLOVER, CHRIS TACKE, GARY GATTIS, MARVIN LEBLANC, QUENTIN DONNELLAN, Charles hurst

STAKEHOLDERS

CEO OF HYPERGIANT, CEO OF GALACTIC SYSTEMS, VP OF DESIGN (HYPERGIANT), HEAD OF ENGINEERING (HYPERGIANT)

A single software platform for planning, observing, and executing missions conducted on cubesat constellations.

HIVE combines the workflows of Mission Planners, Ground Controllers, and Flight Operators in a single powerful desktop application.

GOALS →

Help our flight operations team efficiently conduct missions on satellite constellations with flexible hardware payloads and varying mission parameters. The solution needed to accommodate the testing of completely novel sensor hardware in flight. Additionally, our backlog had to support both a long term vision for the product as well as strict deadlines for satellite launches and tests.

One of our goals was to make flight operations scalable by expanding their work outside of the traditional centralized control room.

TARGET AUDIENCE →

We had the benefit of our own internal flight operations team that included a Flight Director with decades of experience flying missions for NASA.

FLIGHT DIRECTORS

Responsible for ensuring success of the overall mission.

GROUND CONTROLLERS

Maintains the communications network from any control point all the way up to the hardware in flight.

FLIGHT OPERATORS

Conduct the day-to-day operations of the mission. They monitor the constellation and execute commands based on the mission plan.

MISSION PLANNERS

Determine the optimal cadence of mission goals based on the number of ground station passes available within the defined mission window.

Although the flight operations team was quite experienced, the tools they used would make it difficult to scale their efforts to a fleet of hundreds of spacecraft.

WHAT WE LEARNED →

With our own flight operations team, we had the benefit of directly observing their work day-to-day and during missions. This access also made frequent co-design sessions much more feasible.

TOP 3 THINGS WE LEARNED

Even at the highest levels, a surprising amount of work is still done by hand or in Excel spreadsheets.
Depending on what type of communications network you use, data is often always historic. It isn't always real-time.
It is hard to predict everything that may go wrong on the various hardware systems across every satellite in the constellation.

The flight operations team must coordinate their efforts around brief 5-12 minute ground station passes.

WHAT WE CREATED →

CUSTOMIZABLE DISPLAYS

Given the naturally risky nature of spaceflight and the broad range of goals from mission to mission, Hive provides a maximally flexible mission observation tool. The flight operations team can build any number and configuration of data views from a palette of components ranging from individual data points to 3D environmental visualizations. An individual flight operator can build and share these with their team in order to illustrate, and help investigate, issues and anomalies as they come up.

MISSION PLANNER

This tool helps the Mission Planner determine the number of ground station passes necessary to accomplish the mission goals set out by the Flight Director. The team adds a checklist of mission objectives to each pass and loads the necessary satellite commands for completing each objective. Performance is tracked as each pass is completed, helping them make better decisions about when and where to adjust the plan later to ensure mission success.

COMMAND TOOL

One of the best skills of a designer is recognizing a great idea even if it isn't your own. One of the flight operators had created his own tool for sending commands to the satellite without having to type them manually each time. We borrowed heavily from what he created and added a number of crucial elements such as short list of commands automatically copied from the Mission Planner and a countdown timer based on the length of the current ground station pass.

MISSION TIMELINE

At any point in a mission, the flight operations team can scrub the timeline at the bottom of their Observe dashboards to see the state of every visible data point at that moment in time. This combined with the flexibility they have to build customized dashboards gives them the power to troubleshoot any possible problem more quickly and make more informed decisions going forward.