Lockheed Martin is preparing to integrate customised apps to its ground station solutions for managing future space exploration.

The app-based solutions are said to improve efficiency of services between operators and missions.

The ground station app technology will bring together commercial products, flexible software and open standards to provide modular and extensible solutions.

"Transitioning to software-based mission-agnostic ground systems provides a flexible, simpler model with a lower lifecycle cost and up to 15% savings in service management costs."

With the new framework, apps can be customised easily to the mission with capabilities to adapt to new orders, Lockheed Martin said.

Lockheed Martin space ground solutions vice-president Vinny Sica said: "We want to shape the future of the industry.

"Transitioning to software-based mission-agnostic ground systems provides a flexible, simpler model with a lower lifecycle cost and up to 15% savings in service management costs."

The modern ground infrastructure with software-based solutions will facilitate reducing operational hardware costs by up to 75%, leading the way to manage future space exploration.

In general, satellite operator tasks, including programming a satellite to orbit the Earth, monitoring data from ground sensors and launch activities are managed as separate functions.

With the new solution, these tasks can be managed as single apps on a common operating platform, which will increase mission performance by 20%, the company said.