The Systems Health Information Portal (SHIP)

I designed and developed the Systems Health Information Portal (SHIP) for space vehicle health management. I built this information management system with dynamic web page generation, web services, J2EE components, and enterprise information integration (EII) technologies. SHIP accesses and transforms data from disparate sources into useful integrated information, and ultimately into a knowledge base of fault analyses, prognostications, and corrective procedures. It is currently being tested on the International Space Station, and it will eventually be deployed on the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) that will take astronauts back to the moon. Click for diagram of the SHIP architecture.

ComputerWorld recently published an article about my work on SHIP, “NASA Testing In-house System for Analyzing Space Station Health”.

The Collaborative Information Portal (CIP)

I was the architect and lead developer of the middleware of the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP), an enterprise application still being used by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers mission. That’s me by a life-size model of the Spirit rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the photo above.

Engineers inside mission control and scientists and researchers worldwide use the software over the Internet. Its three-tiered enterprise architecture comprises a client application tier, a service-oriented middleware tier, and a data repository tier. The client applications enable users to view current staffing and event schedules, download data and image files generated by the rovers, receive broadcast messages, and get accurate times in various Earth and Mars time zones. The middleware accesses these heterogeneous data from the data repositories, which it serves reliably, efficiently, and securely in response to client requests. I’m proud to report that after nearly two years, or over 17,000 continuous hours of operation, my middleware has maintained an uptime record of better than 99.9%.

IEEE Internet Computing published an article I wrote about CIP, “The Collaborative Information Portal and NASA’s Mars Rover Mission” in its January/February 2005 issue. I also gave an interview to the Santa Cruz Sentinel about my mission support work at JPL.

Presentations

I gave many presentations about my NASA work to industry groups and to academia. Some of them are shown in the table below. Click on the titles to download PDF files of my slides.

Date	Venue	Type	Title
July 6, 2006	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory	Invited talk	Managing Scientific Data: Two NASA Case Studies
November 18, 2005	IBM Almaden Research Center	Invited talk	The Martian Principles for Successful Enterprise Systems: Lessons from Developing the Collaborative Information Portal for NASA’s Mars Rover Mission
July 19, 2005	Sun Microsystems Laboratories	Invited talk	Enterprise Systems for Mars, the Space Station, and Other Interesting Places
February 3, 2005	UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering: Graduate Seminar in Software Engineering	Seminar	How to Develop Reliable Mission-Critical Enterprise Software
June 29, 2004	JavaOne 2004	Seminar	Java Technologies, Web Services, and Mars: A NASA Trip Report
May 26, 2004	BEA eWorld Conference	Keynote address	Enterprise Development for Mars and Other Alien Places
May 4, 2004	Stanford University Networking Research Center	Seminar	The Mars Rover Information Portal