DMU Computer and Information Sciences Project Proposal

Project Title Satellite Control Centre

Proposer Martin Stacey (with Rodney Buckland)

Software Procedural or object oriented language with good GUI facilities

Covers GUI design and development

Skills Required Programming, interface design, interest in space technology

Brief Description

The Humble Space Telescope is the brainchild of Rodney Buckland of the Open University. This will be a space telescope, operating in the visual range, that will be available to amateur astronomers. People wanting Humble to take photographs of astronomical phenomena for them will be able to submit requests to the control centre, and all interested parties will be able to see what Humble is currently doing via the web. Humble will be controlled from a control room open to the public.

The objective of the project is to design and prototype the human computer interfaces and visual displays for the Humble control centre. The interfaces will be used to control the satellite, but also for showing visitors what the satellite does and how it is controlled, so the system needs to be well designed for both its functional and educational purposes. The interfaces should form an integrated system, though the control interfaces and visual displays can occupy several different monitors. The project should concentrate on careful and imaginative design of the user interfaces, though the non-interactive displays should also be clearly specified, and where possible prototyped. Ideally the interface prototype should be fully functional, in that it is capable of driving the back-end control functions and accepting information for display.

Variants/Extensions

One very good way to make the interface prototype more effective and convincing as a concept demonstrator would be to use it to drive a simulation of satellite behaviour, which would then feed back state information to be displayed by the interface prototype.

The design of the interfaces could be enhanced or justified by the use of formal methods for analysing and evaluating interfaces. You could choose to make this a major part of your project; in any event credit will be given for good use of evaluation methods.