2009 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program

Figure 58:
The Experimenter Interface Panel (EIP) unit.
Data visualization tools, customized to the
different instrument types, are also essential to
present the information to the science teams in
a usable form for decision making. Software
development for this purpose is being led by the
University of North Dakota’s National Suborbital
Education and Research Center (NSERC) and the
Real Time Mission Monitor team at Marshall Space
Flight Center. Based on initial implementations by
NSERC on the DC-8, these tools will be further
implemented in the Global Hawk Operations
Center (GHOC) at NASA Dryden in early 2010.
Elements of the NASA Ames Collaborative
Decision Environment (CDE) and its related web
applications, will also be incorporated to facilitate
communication and data-sharing with extended
science teams across the Internet. Derived from
software used to manage the Mars planetary rovers
and adapted to airborne platforms for the Western
States Fire UAS Missions, the CDE enables realtime
interchange between science investigators and
mission participants from virtually any location.
Along with the complex software required
to support the real-time data environment,
specialized flight hardware is also required. One
essential element is an enhanced version of
the navigation data recorders currently in use
on the ER-2 and WB-57 aircraft. These units
capture platform and other state data from the
aircraft avionics systems and re-broadcast them
to the payload instruments. Incorporating the
Ethernet network functionality developed at
Dryden Flight Research Center on the REVEAL
project, the next-generation of these systems will
be called the NASA Airborne Science Data and
Telemetry (NASDAT ) system and is scheduled
to deploy 2010. Modified versions of REVEAL
were deployed on the P-3 and DC-8 this year, as
NASDAT prototypes. Accompanying this will
be a new standard Experimenter Interface Panel
(EIP) that will provide electrical power, network
communications, and the state data feeds to the
various aircraft payload areas. The first of the
new EIP units were completed in 2009, and will
be installed on the Global Hawk, together with a
modified REVEAL unit, pending the availability
of the new NASDATs. The EIP/NASDAT
combination will eventually be installed on all
the core NASA science platforms. In addition,
the Global Hawk UAS has unique hardware
requirements to transform it into a science
platform. A Master Payload Control System/
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