SYNOPSIS: Science Yield improvemeNt via Onboard Prioritization and Summary of Information System

SYNOPSIS is a system to prioritize the downlink of data products, including both raw data products as well as "autonomous science data products" that are extracted onboard the spacecraft to summarize data.

Team

• Mark Wronkiewicz
• Gary Doran
• Jack Lightholder
• Zaki Hasnain
• Rex Stockham
• Robert Brown (JSTAR team at NASA IV&V)
• Scott Zemerick (JSTAR team at NASA IV&V)
• Lukas Mandrake

Building SYNOPSIS

1. Run cmake -S . -B build to set up the build directory
2. Run cmake --build build to build the code
3. Run cd build && ctest to execute the tests

SYNOPSIS Integration into cFS

See the core Flight Software (cFS) README file for instructions on building SYNOPSIS in support of a cFS app.

YouTube: Integration demo with NOS3

Click the below image to see a demo simulating the use of SYNOPSIS (integrated into cFS) for data prioritization. Commands are sent to exercise SYNOPSIS's functionality and a simple dashboard tracks and visualizes data from the OWLS-Autonomy project as it moves through the onboard processing steps.

Testing

To test from scratch, run the following commands:

1. ssh itlinux-b (or equivalent machine)
2. git clone [email protected]:SYNOPSIS/synopsis.git
3. cd synopsis
4. Proceed with the Setup steps above

For development only: code testing & coverage stats

Note this requires lcov

1. cmake --build build_cov
2. cd build_cov
3. ctest
4. lcov --capture --directory CMakeFiles/synopsis.dir/src --exclude "*sqlite3*" --output-file coverage.info
5. genhtml coverage.info --output-directory out
6. View stats HTML build_cov/out/index.html

Compiling rule files

The rules files are defined in a human readable form via the .srd files. To prepare these rules for use within SYNOPSIS, they must be converted to a .json representation. To do that, use the srd_to_json.py script as follows:

python synopsis/python/synopsis/srd_to_json.py \
/path/to/my/synposis_rules.srd \
/path/to/my/synposis_rules.json

Architecture Overview

SYNOPSIS is designed to be a modular framework for downlink prioritization to be incorporated into flight software frameworks such as F' or cFS. Users of the SYNOPSIS library instantiate an Application (see synopsis.hpp) along with a number of modules. Modules include:

• Autonomous Science Data Systems (see ASDS.hpp)
• An Autonomous Science Data Product Database (see ASDPDB.hpp)
• A Downlink Planner (see DownlinkPlanner.hpp)
• A Logger (see Logger.hpp)
• A Clock (see Clock.hpp)

The ASDSs are registered with an application instance after construction (see Application::add_asds), whereas the other modules are used during application construction. After registering ASDSs, the application instance should be initialized using Application::init. A helper function Application::memory_requirement specifies how much pre-allocated memory should be passed to the application for initialization.

After initialization, new data products can be ingested into SYNOPSIS using the Application::accept_dp function. Data product messages passed to this function contain information about the data product's origin (i.e., which instrument produced it), type, location on a filesystem, and metadata location. Invoking this function will either synchronously or asynchronously (depending on the design of the ASDS) process the data product to produce an autonomous science data product (ASDP), which will then be inserted into the ASDP database (ASDPDB).

SYNOPSIS provides an interface to manually update information in the ASDP DB, which can be invoked via ground commands. These functions are:

• Application::update_science_utility
• Application::update_priority_bin
• Application::update_downlink_state
• Application::update_asdp_metadata

At any time, the user of SYNOPSIS can also invoke the Application::prioritize function, which will return a prioritized list of ASDPs using a set of prioritization rules and constraints, along with similarity configuration for diversity-aware prioritization. This functionality should be invoked prior to a downlink pass, and the information associated with unique ASDP identifier can be queried from the ASDP DB to enable transmission to the ground. After transmission, the downlink state of each transmitted ASDP should be updated so that subsequent invocations of the Application::prioritize function exclude these data products.

Finally, when SYNOPSIS functionality is no longer required, the Application::deinit function can be used to relinquish the use of the memory provided during application initialization. Initialization and de-initialization can be performed as often as necessary (i.e., immediately prior to and after the invocation of one of the functions above that requires SYNOPSIS to be initialized). One exception is for asynchronous ASDSs; SYNOPSIS must be initialized when an ASDS returns its result to be submitted to the ASDP DB.

Acknowledgements

Funding and support for this work was provided by the Multi-mission Ground Systems and Services (MGSS) program office.

Copyright 2023, by the California Institute of Technology. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. United States Government Sponsorship acknowledged. Any commercial use must be negotiated with the Office of Technology Transfer at the California Institute of Technology.

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