NASA Sounding Rocket Underflights 

36.289 US Terrier-Black Brant was launched from White Sands Missile Range on July 22, 2014. This was a re-fly of the 36.263 payload that contained the new prototype experiment instruments known as the Degradation Free Spectrometers (DFS) for Solar Physics. This mission provided well calibrated, significantly improved absolute irradiance measurements (with instrument response functions measured at the NIST SURF synchrotron facility) for inter-calibration with on-orbit EUV instrumentation on SOHO and SDO satellites.

As part of the three member payload integration team from USC SSC, I was involved with multiple aspects of onsite testing and calibration of our four flight instruments, at all stages of instrument payload integration with the US Terrier Black Brent sounding rocket. My primary responsibilities also included designing the instrument/flight data acquisition software and the mission dashboard. 

Pictures from launch36.289 at WhiteSands Missle Range, July 2014

CALSO-DAQ Software

I designed the data acquisition software that was used to parse-store and visualize the instrument data from four of our instruments. This DAQ software acquires the telemetry data  (using RS 232 serial port) from the Ground station unit during the calibration under-flights. The software was used for multiple instrument calibrations at NIST and was also the real time dashboard for flight at mission control in White Sands, New Mexico . The current software is designed in LAB VIEW (I also wrote another version in .net). The 1.2K baud data rate has an average of 4 frames per second with each frame having 13 words of 16 bits each. There were two such data streams (OFS and SOHO). The Vi files can be downloaded from attachments below. 

Screenhsot of the Telemetry-Instrument Dashboard during 36.289 Underflight from White Sands, July 2014

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