Large amounts of data collected by today’s sensitive scientific instruments pose a data handling challenge for avionics and computing systems for suborbital small rocket and balloon missions.
Large amounts of data collected by today’s sensitive scientific instruments pose a data handling challenge for small rocket and balloon mission computing systems.
“In general, science payloads are becoming larger and more complex,” said astrophysicist Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You are always pushing the limit of what can be done, and getting your data back quickly is clearly a high priority for the balloon science community.”
Suborbital science platforms offer low-cost, rapid-turnaround testing opportunities to study Earth, our solar system, and the universe. Engineers at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia are developing new, higher-capacity systems to process, store and transmit this data using IRAD’s Internal Research and Development Program.
A big-data effort, Kogut said, requires new types of sensors to capture faint patterns in the cosmic microwave background: the oldest light in the cosmos, which was produced 380,000 years after the big bang, when the universe cooled enough to form the first atoms.
Capturing the polarization – the orientation of this light relative to its path of travel – should show patterns in the original quantum state of the universe, he explained. If observed, these patterns could point the way to a quantum theory of gravity: something beyond Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
“Observing this polarization requires a lot of data,” Kogut said. “The results are limited by the noise at any individual detector, so scientists aim to fly up to 10,000 detectors in a balloon to minimize that noise.”
While a high-altitude balloon floating above the clouds is an ideal place for missions to observe space without disturbance from Earth’s atmosphere, it’s also a good place to get hit by cosmic rays that our atmosphere filters out, he explained. These high-energy particles scatter through the solid structures of the balloon’s payload, producing unwanted signals – noise – in the detectors.
Faster, lighter, less expensive
CASBa, the Comprehensive Avionics System for Balloons, aims to replace a system originally developed in the 1980s, said Sarah Wright, NASA Wallops suborbital technology lead. CASBa will capture, process and transmit gigabytes rather than the megabyte capacity of the current system. Building it around commercially supplied computer cores also keeps mission costs low while reducing mass, Wright added.
“That’s the essence of rocket and balloon science,” she said. “If it is relatively cheap and available on the market, scientists could invest more resources in developing the scientific package.”
CASBa will provide a variety of options and configurations for different mission needs, she said, and will work with the Flight System core operational software developed at NASA Goddard.
Once proven in a balloon flight this summer, a sounding rocket version will be tested in 2025. Additional IRAD projects seek to develop more efficient power-switching electronics and higher data rate transmission capabilities that together , complete computing and download capacity. revision.
Engineer Ted Daisey leads IRAD’s effort to integrate a commercially available computer the size of a credit card into its control module.
“We’re building this around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, which is an industrial product aimed at embedded systems,” Daisey said, “so it will be very cost-effective for suborbital projects we do here at Wallops.”
Engineer Scott Hesh is developing the power switching unit to complement the Raspberry Pi CM4 computer. He described it as a modular switch that distributes the system’s power supply among up to eight different hardware systems. It uses programmable software “fuses” to protect components from overheating, as well as hardware fuses to protect the power switching unit.
“The avionics package takes up a little less space and less mass than a current sounding rocket system,” he said. “But it’s a game changer when it comes to avionics and communications implementation. Each module measures approximately 8 by 6 inches, which is much smaller compared to our current balloon systems.”
“This whole 21st The 19th century avionics system was designed based on our Wallops philosophy of fast, agile and cost-effective solutions for our suborbital platforms,” Hesh added.
Per Carlos B. Hille
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
