HMP Research Station | Haughton-Mars Project: Exploration Systems Support at HMP

Dr. Stephen Braham, Christine Pires, Steve Baird

A unique component of HMP is the level of support for advanced planetary exploration systems and operations, in full-up, end to end, mission operations experiments. HMP has high-speed connections to the Internet via two satellite dishes, which allows for audio, video and data links all the way from mission operations centres at space agencies to the entire region around HMP. On top of that, the network can be made to emulate connections, in terms of delay, that range from moon missions to missions to Jupiter.

Since 1999 the primary exploration systems support at HMP have been provided by Dr. Steve Braham, Mars Institute/Simon Fraser University (SFU) and his team. Dr. Braham, now in his tenth field season, is the Chief Field Engineer and Associate Director for HMP, and, this year. He is the lead of the Exploration Systems Operations Centre (ExSOC) project at his lab at SFU, PolyLAB, which is a unit of the SFU Telematics Research Laboratory, lead by Steve's long-term research partner Professor Peter Anderson.

Steve is assisted by Christine Pires and Steven Baird. Christine, another key figure at HMP, is in her fourth field season here, and is Steve's right hand person, without whom much of his work on Devon would be impossible without her. She is a fully-qualified Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, and provides most day to day user support at HMP, as well as helping Steve during the year in designing, configuring, testing, and delivering systems for analog planetary exploration missions. Steven is new to the team, and is a mechanical engineering student at UBC. He is showing himself to be invaluable in day to day support of systems in the field. Together the tight-knit team allows HMP to provide a high-fidelity environment for lunar exploration systems and science research.

Since 1999, The Canadian government's Communication Research Centre (CRC), in Ottawa, has provided the primary C-band satellite link for the project, operating via Telesat's Anik F1-R spacecraft in geostationary orbit. CRC are long term collaborators with Peter and Steve. The C-band link connects HMP directly into Canada's high-speed research backbone. CA*Net4, and this link is the basis for the fully emulated planetary exploration network, allowing high quality of service network connections that behave like those used in actual planetary exploration missions. In addition to this link is a high-speed Ka-band link, provided by Telesat, in collaboration with CRC and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), that provides for day to day operational traffic for HMP, such as e-mail and web traffic and other services.

The dishes connect to the world's most advanced network found in a planetary exploration camp - with high-speed enterprise-grade networks, operating with fibre-optics, wireless meshes, and long-range high-speed wireless connections up to 20km away from HMPRS. This network, developed by SFU, has validated and demonstrated, over the last decade, many of the approaches now found in the present NASA baseline lunar communication architectures. The ExSOC team is now looking forward to the next decade, and next generation of networks, where they will push capability and capacity even further to understand full-up mission operations at the data rates expected on the moon, at a range of analog sites, including HMP.

-by Dr. Stephen Braham (SFU / HMP Associate Director)