Ground station markup language

We describe our efforts to reduce the complexity in ground stations and increase multi-mission support of ground station installations. We are developing a method for flexible application support by ground stations that reduces overall station complexity. Taking advantage of software-defined systems, we use virtual machines to enable extreme user customization of ground station capabilities. To compliment this work, we are developing an informal reference model to capture core ground station capabilities. From this, we are building a command and control language built on an XML framework, called the ground station markup language (GSML). We are working with universities around the world to build a loose federation of globally distributed university ground stations, called the mercury ground station network, where GSML is the core messaging protocol.