Team Activity Coordination Tool (tACT)

The Team Activity Coordination Tool (tACT) is used by a project’s mission planners to develop, schedule, execute, and manage activities to be performed by the mission operations team, especially during periods of intense activity such as observatory commissioning and science campaigns. It ingests flight dynamics events, contact schedules, and other events generated by the flight dynamics and mission planning systems, and allows the planners to organize a sequence of activities along this integrated event timeline to create a coordinated plan. It includes a web-based user interface that provides easy-to-comprehend graphical timelines and intuitive tools for activity planning. Users can create any number of customized timeline views that show only events and activities of interest over a desired time range.

The tACT supports a paper-free capability to maintain real-time communication of the plan and plan updates among mission subsystems teams. Activity definitions can include complex constraints with respect to timeline events and/or other activities. Activities can be grouped in to hierarchies to express parent-child relationships. Activities can be linked to events so they automatically move when an event time changes.

The tACT system comprises two main components: the server and the client. The client component is built on Javascript and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The client component passes data requests to the server and renders the resulting information for the user. The server component implements the tACT business logic, handles the client requests, and interacts with an off-the-shelf SQL database such as PostgreSQL for data storage and retrieval.  All of the tool’s state and history is stored in the database. The server component also is responsible for ingesting user event files.

The tACT is the evolution of a tool that originally was developed during the Aura launch readiness campaign. The Aura Mission Planning Tool (AMPT) filled a significant void in managing the activation timeline of a new spacecraft mission. The tool was later updated to support the NPOESS Preparatory Project where it was known as Everest. The third mission that the tool directly supported was the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, where the tool was known as tACT. Hammers substantially re-engineered tACT in 2013, and the now-current version was adopted by the MMS mission to plan and coordinate commissioning of their 4-spacecraft fleet.

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