Development of a relay performance web tool for the Mars network

Modern Mars surface missions rely upon orbiting spacecraft to relay communications to and from Earth systems. An important component of this multi-mission relay process is the collection of relay performance statistics supporting strategic trend analysis and tactical anomaly identification and tracking. Through the early Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission this data collection was performed via a tedious manual process cumulating in the continuous update of an Excel spreadsheet. For the Phoenix mission, this process was greatly improved with a new software system called the relay data engineering (RDE) system. This system provides sharing of performance data via event-driven automated data collection processes, a back-end database and a Web user interface. This paper will discuss lessons learned form the development, deployment and operations of the RDE system.