2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program

ground control station, and is responsible for
ensuring airworthiness of the vehicles, quality
assurance, configuration management, and
system safety. NASA and NGC are each
providing approximately half of the project
staffing and will share equal access to the
NASA Global Hawk system. During the
standup of the program, the aircraft are being
modified with a new independent airborne
and ground integrated system for command,
control, and communications (C3) with
payloads.
A fixed NASA Global Hawk Operations
Center (GHOC) is being developed at
Dryden, which is configured to independently
support air vehicle and payload operations.
The Flight Operations Room (FOR) of the
GHOC will consist of workstations occupied
by the personnel responsible for the flight
control and management of the air vehicle
operations. An adjacent Payload Operations
Room (POR) will consist of workstations
occupied by the personnel responsible for
the various air vehicle payloads. The POR
personnel can monitor payload status, receive
payload data, and control their individual
payloads.
Flight operations of the Global Hawk are
scheduled to begin during the second
quarter of FY09 and research flights are
scheduled to begin during the third quarter.
The first Global Hawk science campaign
will be 2009 Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac)
mission
Figure 33
NASA Global Hawk #872 in front of Hangar 4801 at the
Dryden Flight Research Center.
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