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Development of a Vehicle Health Monitoring System for the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster ProgramDuring their brief flight, the space shuttle solid rocket boosters (SRBs) experience a severe environment. This environment in most cases is unknown. When the design engineers believe they understand the environments, something new occurs. For example, at water impact several SRBs have sustained noticeable structural damage. The severity of the damage is usually dependent upon the waves that the SRB encounter at splashdown. The space shuttle is presently scheduled to fly until 2030. To support the shuttle flight schedule, the avionics on the SRB's will need to be upgraded. The environments on the different sections of the SRB will need to be defined more completely to properly qualify the avionics for multiple flights. The combination of new avionics systems and unknown flight environments led Marshall Space Flight Center's (MSFC) SRB Project Office to request the Science and Engineering (S&E) Directorate to develop a stand-alone data acquisition system that could collect data from any area of the booster. The Enhanced Data Acquisition System (EDAS) was developed to meet this request. However, the EDAS has some technical drawbacks that needed resolved. To answer the EDAS problems, the SRB Project Office has funded MSFC's Avionics Department to begin investigating a new vehicle health monitoring (VHM) system. The major requirements are the system shall have 64 channels, have programmable sample rates up to 10,000 samples per second, have sufficient memory for a twenty minute flight and not interfere with existing operational flight avionics hardware. This paper will describe the effort to develop a VHM system that can meet the SRB requirements.
Document ID
20000036569
Acquisition Source
Marshall Space Flight Center
Document Type
Preprint (Draft being sent to journal)
Authors
Crawford, Kevin
(NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Huntsville, AL United States)
Date Acquired
August 19, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2000
Subject Category
Spacecraft Propulsion And Power
Meeting Information
Meeting: Digital Avionics Systems
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Country: United States
Start Date: October 10, 2000
End Date: October 12, 2000
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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