Command & Control
- Real-time telemetry displays
- Distributed, scalable workstation-based architecture
- Flight-proven ground system heritage
On August 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — an observatory designed to survey the sky a thousand times faster than Hubble and to help settle open questions about dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets.
Roman was constructed, assembled, and tested at Goddard Space Flight Center. It is now on a three-month journey of roughly one million miles to a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, where its Wide Field Instrument — a 300-megapixel infrared camera with a field of view more than 100 times that of Hubble — will begin returning data at approximately 1.4 terabytes per day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission flown to date.
Controlling and monitoring an observatory of that complexity falls to ASIST, the Advanced Spacecraft Integration and System Test Software developed at Goddard. ASIST has served as the command-and-control ground system for Goddard missions for more than two decades, processing ground-system data during integration and test and interpreting telemetry once a spacecraft is on orbit.
Within ASIST, the operator interface is built on Sammi.
Sammi is Kinesix’s human-machine interface platform for real-time command-and-control environments. It transforms complex telemetry streams into graphical displays — meters, trends, bar charts, animated status graphics — that operators read at a glance rather than parsing as text. Its graphical display builder requires no programming or compilation of graphics code, so display changes that would otherwise be a development cycle become a configuration change made by the operations team itself.
That distinction matters more on a mission like Roman than it might elsewhere. During the three-month commissioning period now underway, instruments are run through successive rounds of calibration and test. Each of those activities has its own monitoring requirements, and the displays operators need on any given day are not necessarily the displays anyone specified years earlier during ground system development. A display layer that can be reconfigured without a software release is a schedule asset.
Sammi’s distributed architecture allows displays to be networked across multiple workstations on the ground, so mission teams, instrument specialists, and engineering support all work from the same live data without contention. The scalability that has let Sammi handle terabyte-scale mission data at Goddard for other programs is the same property that makes it viable against Roman’s downlink volume.
Roman is the latest mission in a lineage that runs back through ASIST’s history at Goddard — the same ground system architecture, the same operator interface platform, now supporting an observatory that will map a billion galaxies.
NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images in early 2027.
Sammi® is a registered trademark of Kinesix Software.