Understanding the universe is a never ending quest, and each discovery raises new questions. To acquire the data that will answer these questions, NASA is deploying increasingly complex scientific and environmental observation spacecraft. These platforms have, however, placed a growing burden on NASA's downlink assets, ground based systems, and operating costs. Communications bandwidth and processing throughput already constrain scientific data gathering in both volume and rate. This limitation forces scientists to make hard choices between data collection priorities on one hand and bandwidth, processing, and archiving priorities on the other. The article presents an example of the complex phenomena about which NASA gathers data. Over the past few decades, advances in ground based processing and space-to-Earth links have fallen further behind NASA's requirements for handling observation data. Thus NASA's ability to observe and capture Earth phenomena of theoretical and practical interest far outstrips its ability to transfer, process, or store such data. Increasing the onboard computing power of spacecraft is one solution that may allow both space and ground based systems to address these limitations.
Extending NASA's data processing to spacecraft
Computer, Long Beach ; 32 , 6 ; 115-119
1999
5 Seiten
Article (Journal)
English
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