The new software boasts colorful display grids of spacecraft subsystems such as spacecraft power, reaction wheel performance and temperature control. This screen shows subsystem data from the Magellan spacecraft, which conducted a radar-mapping mission at Venus, and the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are currently exploring regions of the solar system above and below the ecliptic plane in which Earth orbits the Sun. The cyberspace environment presents data in three dimensions, using specified colors and shapes, such as squares, circles and diamonds, to denote different data channels and values.
Motion is used to denote changes in the status quo of any given data channel.
The new software boasts colorful display grids of spacecraft subsystems. Each grid can be rotated at different angles to give controllers different dimensional views of the data. Up to 20 or 30 individual spacecraft can be monitored simultaneously with this new cyberspace feature. Most importantly, a visual software interface allows us to display a dramatically increased amount of data all at the same time and it gives operators immediate visual recognition of potential problems by using icons that change in color or begin flashing when a situation is becoming serious on board the craft. The system is a departure from conventional text-based software programs.