Reengineering the Hubble space telescope control center system

The Hubble Space Telescope was funded in the late 1970s, when mainframes still ruled the world. By the time the Hubble was launched in 1990, desktop computers were ubiquitous, powerful, and about to be hyperlinked through the Internet. Hubble´s operations control center at NASA´s Goddard Space Flight Center reflects these profound changes in computing technology. It has dozens of computing platforms and a control system that evolved over the course of 15 years of project development and subsequent operations. Efforts to reengineer these operational systems are now under way in a project called Vision 2000. The engineers at Goddard are implementing a three-tiered system architecture to integrate the heterogeneous computing environments that have evolved over the years. The new system uses a Web-based graphical user interface, written in Java, to enable greater access to engineering data than has ever before been possible. This GUI represents a Java implementation that is both large-scale (1.5 million lines of code) and mission-critical