AEROSPACE SYSTEMS
The PTR Aerospace Systems team has substantial expertise with spacecraft and ground station systems. Our engineers have helped place over 40 satellites successfully on orbit with over 300 total years of on-orbit operations spanning the past 12 years. From technology experiment satellites, to commercial communication satellite constellations, our staff have a vast experience to offer in the areas of:
- System design,
- Bus and payload flight software design and implementation,
- Control algorithm development and implementation
- Ground station software and systems,
- Device driver and board support package development, and
- Final system performance and environmental test.
We are always engaged in supporting cutting edge work in ground station and satellite based systems.
Flight Software
Small satellite experience is only part of what makes The PTR Group unique. Specializing in real-time and embedded software, PTR engineers have worked with a wide range of technologies including more than a dozen CPU architectures, all popular RTOS offerings including VxWorks and Linux, multiple communication systems including RS485, MIL-STD 1553, Ethernet, CCSDS, HDLC, and more. We specialize in using our low-level implementation knowledge at the system level to build well-conceived, maintained, and efficient systems.
Spacecraft Systems
Our staff has a vast breadth of experience to offer in the realm of spacecraft system design and software development. As our History shows, we have a long track record of demonstrated capability in all areas of the spacecraft design, implementation, integration, and testing lifecycles.
Mission Operation
With our knowledge of spacecraft systems design and flight software, The PTR Group offers expertise in the development and deployment of mission operation systems. Leveraging our flight software heritage, PTR Group Engineers create robust, high performance, software and systems for mission operations.
Virtual Mission Operations Center
Web based tasking and exploitation of taskable assets
Historically, ground control systems have been implemented as stovepipe systems. These monolithic systems were designed specifically for one asset, were very tightly integrated with the hardware that they ran on, and were written in the context of a single system utilizing the data. Design decisions along this path were necessary twenty years ago when computer hardware was slow, memory was limited, and computer languages were very basic. In contrast to this, the past decade has seen an impressive improvement in hardware and software. Processor speeds have increased over 100 fold with multiprocessor systems now being the norm rather than the exception. Memory capacities have increased over 1000 times, hardware has become a commodity item, and computer languages have evolved to support larger and larger projects. With all of these changes in the technology landscape, ground systems are still developed and operated in the archaic mindset they started in.
The PTR Group, Inc., having extensive experience in hardware integration and software development, working with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), has developed the Virtual Mission Operations Center (VMOC) to address this problem. The VMOC brings proven state of the art software technology and programming methodology, into a distributable, modular system. A robust framework has been developed that uses open interface standards and runs on readily available commodity hardware. By virtue of its distributable nature the framework is automatically able to take advantage of improvements and advances in multi-core and multiprocessor computer architectures. Reliance on open standards provides for the use of commodity hardware and the ability to choose the best components to use at the time of deployment rather than at the time of development.
Selected Commercial Customers
- Orbcomm
- Orbital
- Comtech
- Argon
- Rockwell Collins
- ITT
Aerospace Timeline - A history of our performance in aerospace development