Chapter 3. Full Ground Station

What is your mission producing? Why, it’s producing Mission Data. This includes health and safety telemetry—which your customers couldn’t care less about. Primarily, they want the payload or instrument data. Processing this data and generating useful technical or scientific data is what you (or your customer wants).

Missions often split into a Mission Operations Center (MOC) that operates and maintains the health of the satellite and handles communications uplinks and downlinks, and a separate Science Operations Center (SOC) that receives the payload/instrument data from the MOC and distributes it to customers. Think of the MOC as the engineering side and the SOC as the science side. As an Internet analogy, think ...

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