Chapter 11: Data Acquisition from Space via the Internet

Chapter 11: Data Acquisition from Space via the Internet

Ed Baroth, Ph.D., and George Wells

Measurement Technology Center (MTC), Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Overview

Now that you?ve had a chance to read about the nuts and bolts of networking in LabVIEW, let?s take a look at a serious application of those tools. We had the good fortune to be part of the team providing ground support for an experiment on the space shuttle Endeavour (STS-, May 16?29, 1996). If you were lucky enough to see data from that experiment ?live? on the Web (and half a million people did), then you saw the future of data acquisition. The data was sent from Endeavour to the Payload Operations Control Center (POCC, part of Mission Control) at NASA?s Johnson Space Center in Houston, then to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory?s Measurement Technology Center. From JPL it was sent to National Instruments in Austin, Texas, then out on the Web. Most times it was on the Web 10 seconds after we saw it in Houston (Fig. 11.1).

Figure 11.1: Path of data from space. ( Courtesy of National Instruments. )

The Internet has revolutionized data acquisition. In the (very recent) past, data acquisition was a local event. A computer was connected to sensors providing direct data acquisition. Networking was usually rare. A sneaker net was often used to take data from the lab to the office for analysis. Data acquisition, analysis, display, and monitoring are now global events. Information...

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Chapter 11: Data Acquisition from Space via the Internet

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