Mission Control Software

Open MCT is a web-based mission control software originally developed at NASA JPL. It’s an amazing piece of software, but I wanted something a bit more extensible. So, over the last month, I’ve been working on a project called MCS (Mission Control Software): a robust display and mission control package for hobbyists or developers working on rockets, autonomous vehicles, drones, etc.

MCS is built with Svelte, and each object is a Svelte component. It differs from Open MCT in how it is run: Open MCT is initialized in each new project folder with its own dependencies, but MCS can be run as a global npm command or via Docker, and it stores each project as a folder with a SQLite database.

I’ve recently been very interested in precision agriculture and especially agricultural drones, which can oversee and survey farmland with far greater detail than public satellites. MCS can be preconfigured with plugins, objects, and custom layouts out of the box to view and even interact with any data source you connect.

Some demo projects are included in MCS, including the Agriculture example. It follows a simulated drone, returning synthetic NDVI data via a plugin, as it surveys a square plot of farmland in Ames, Iowa.

MCS is still early in its development, and I’m building it because I want a mission control setup thats easy to integrate into whatever project I’m working on next.