The purpose of the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrade project was to reduce crew workload and improve situational awareness. The upgrade was to augment the Shuttle avionics system with new hardware and software. An early version of this system was used to gather human factor statistics in the Space Shuttle Motion Simulator of the Johnson Space Center for one month by multiple teams of astronauts. The results were compiled by NASA Ames Research Center and it was was determined that the system provided a better than expected increase in situational awareness and reduction in crew workload. Even with all of the benefits nf the system, NASA cancelled the project towards the end of the development cycle. A major success of this project was the validation of the hardware architecture and software design. This was significant because the project incorporated new technology and approaches for the development of human rated space software. This paper serves as a case study to document knowledge gained and techniques that can be applied for future space avionics development efforts. The major technological advances were the use of reflective memory concepts for data acquisition and the incorporation of Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) products in a human rated space avionics system. The infused COTS products included a real time operating system, a resident linker and loader, a display generation tool set, and a network data manager. Some of the successful design concepts were the engineering of identical outputs in multiple avionics boxes using an event driven approach and inter-computer communication, a reconfigurable data acquisition engine, the use of a dynamic bus bandwidth allocation algorithm. Other significant experiences captured were the use of prototyping to reduce risk, and the correct balance between Object Oriented and Functional based programming.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Case Study of the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrade Software


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    24th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) ; 2005 ; Washington, DC, United States


    Publication date :

    2005-01-01


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    Case Study of the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrade Software

    Ferguson, R. / Thompson, H. C. / American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2005



    Case study of the space shuttle cockpit avionics upgrade software

    Ferguson, R.C. / Thompson, H.C. | IEEE | 2006


    Case Study of the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrade Software

    R. C. Ferguson / H. C. Thompson | NTIS | 2005


    Case study of the Space Shuttle cockpit avionics upgrade software

    Ferguson, R.C. / Thompson, H.C. | IEEE | 2005