One of the companies involved in this refueling effort is the PTR Group. Their chief scientist, Mike Anderson, gave several very interesting presentations at the Embedded Linux Conference / Android Builders Summit earlier this week. Although his presentations were not directly related to the satellite servicing mission, he did say that they are involved in an effort to try and refuel a geostationary weather satellite before the end of this year.

If you are interested in an intermediate sized data acquisition system, then you should take a look at the package that I have written called MX (found at http://mx.iit.edu/). MX currently has several hundred drivers for devices like motors, counter/timers, multichannel analyzers, 2-dimensional imaging detectors, and so forth. The core of MX and the device drivers are written in C in an object oriented style, but these days many of our user applications are written in Python, using wxPython for our GUIs. We have found Python to be an excellent language for writing scientific applications.