Lisa Koons (AppNet, Inc.), Troy Ames (NASA/GSFC), Kenneth Sall (AppNet, Inc.), Craig Warsaw (AppNet, Inc.)
Traditionally instrument command and control systems have been highly specialized, consisting mostly of custom code that is difficult to develop, maintain, and extend. Such solutions are initially very costly and are inflexible to subsequent engineering change requests. Instrument description is too tightly coupled with details of implementation.
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and AppNet, Inc. are developing a very general and highly extensible framework that applies to virtually any kind of instrument that can be controlled by a computer (e.g., microscopes and printers). A key aspect of the object-oriented architecture, implemented in Java, involves software that is driven by an instrument description. The Astronomical Instrument Markup Language (AIML) is a domain-specific implementation of the more generalized Instrument Markup Language (IML). The software architecture combines the platform-independent processing capabilities of Java with the power of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a human-readable and machine-understandable way to describe structured data.
IML is used to describe graphical user interfaces to control and monitor the instrument, command sets and command formats, data streams, communication mechanisms, visualizations, and more. The initial effort is targeted for HAWC (High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera), a first-light instrument of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Another application of this technology is SPIRE (Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver), one of the three focal plane instruments proposed for the European Space Agency's Far Infrared Space Telescope.