TacSat- 4 Prototype Bus & ORS Phase III Bus Standards Update

TacSat- 4 Prototype Bus & ORS Phase III Bus Standards Update

The continuing effort of advancing sound and accepted spacecraft bus standards is the objective of the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Bus Standards Initiative. This effort involves multiple government, industry, and academia participants assembled into an Integrated System Engineering Team (ISET). The initial release of the standards was presented at the 21st AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites as “ISET ORS Bus Standards and Prototype” and contains important background information. This paper updates the status of the ORS Bus Standards, including a major update to the software standards and data protocols. All of these standards are freely available for download from http://projects.nrl.navy.mil/standardbus/. This paper provides an update on the status of the prototype developed to support the TacSat-4 Mission is provided, as well as a report of other ORS standards implementation efforts. The first half of this paper reviews the process as discussed in previous papers. The second half of this paper describes the specific implementation of the bus prototype including design highlights and lessons learned.