New observing strategies testbed: A digital prototyping platform for distributed space missions

The New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T) is a digital engineering environment for enabling distributed space mission (DSM) technology demonstrations. Its event-driven architecture enables users to orchestrate DSM test campaigns by developing applications that communicate state changes via messages. NOS-T is motivated by requirements such as geographical distribution, cross-boundary participation, wide applicability, and usability that make it unique in this field. This article introduces NOS-T and describes its architecture in the context of an example DSM test suite, FireSat+. The scalability of NOS-T is demonstrated with a performance assessment of its capabilities under a stress test of high message frequency and payload size, which are both related to the complexity of potential user-generated test cases. Results show that message periodicity has no significant effect on median delay time over the ranges sampled; however, the message payload size induces linear growth in median delay time of approximately 1.5 ms per kB. Future NOS-T applications can adjust the execution time scaling factor and message payload size to match operational constraints on allowable delay.