Development of a Low Cost Data Acquisition System for the Solid Rocket Booster Program

The Space Transportation System's (STS) Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) experience a severe environment during their brief flight. During the last few years several SRB's have sustained noticeable structural damage. The environmental characteristics (vibration, structure, and thermal) encountered by the SRB's during ascent, descent and water impact are in most cases unknown. A developmental flight instrumentation (DFI) system collected data from the SRB's first four flights in the early 1980's, and after the first three flights during the shuttle return-to-flight phase after the Challenger accident. However, the DFI data collected are of low fidelity and do not correlate well with the observed structural damage. The DFI system was evaluated for reuse, but the cost to fly it was prohibitive. The STS is presently scheduled to fly until 2030. To support the STS schedule the avionics on SRB's will be upgraded. The environments on the different sections of the SRB will need to be defined to properly qualify the avionics for multiple flights. The DFI data previously gathered does not provide enough information to properly qualify the avionics. Marshall Space Flight Centers (MSFC) SRB Project Office requested the Science and Engineering Directorate to develop a self contained data acquisition system that could collect data from any area of the booster. This paper summarizes the effort to develop, test, qualify and fly an Enhanced Data Acquisition System (EDAS) using state-of-the-art commercial off the shelf (COTS) equipment. The first flight of this system occurred on shuttle mission STS-91 in June 1998.