Goddard Engineering and Technology Directorate

Big Science Drives Wallops’ Upgrades for NASA Suborbital Missions

The CASBa, Comprehensive Avionic System for Balloons, under development at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, will occupy about 6 by 8 by 6 inches — about the size of a gallon jug of milk — of payload space while offering higher performance than the existing system. CASBa in this digital rendering includes a computing module, power switching unit, dual antenna GPS system and modem. Credit: NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility
The CASBa, Comprehensive Avionic System for Balloons, under development at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, will occupy about 6 by 8 by 6 inches — about the size of a gallon jug of milk — of payload space while offering higher performance than the existing system. CASBa in this digital rendering includes a computing module, power switching unit, dual antenna GPS system and modem. Credit: NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility

Large amounts of data collected by today’s sensitive science instruments present a data-handling challenge to small rocket and balloon mission computing systems.

“Just generally, science payloads are getting larger and more complex,” said astrophysicist Alan Kogut, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You’re always pushing the limit of what can be done, and getting their data back quickly is clearly a high priority for the balloon science community.”

Suborbital science platforms provide low-cost, quick-turnaround test opportunities to study Earth, our solar system, and the universe. Engineers at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia are developing new, higher-capacity systems to process, store, and transmit that data using the IRAD Internal Research and Development Program.

One high-data effort, Kogut said, requires new types of sensors to capture faint patterns within the cosmic microwave background: the oldest light in the cosmos, which was produced 380,000 years after the big bang, when the universe had cooled enough to form the first atoms.

Capturing the polarization — the orientation of this light relative to its path of travel — should show patterns from the original quantum state of the universe, he explained. If seen, these patterns could point the way to a quantum theory of gravity: something beyond Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

“Observing this polarization takes a lot of data,” Kogut said. “The results are limited by noise in any individual detector, so scientists are looking to fly as many as 10,000 detectors on a balloon to minimize that noise.”

While a high-altitude balloon floating high above the clouds is an ideal place for missions to stare into space without disturbances from Earth’s atmosphere, it’s also a good place to be hit by cosmic rays that our atmosphere filters out, he explained. These high-energy particles spatter throughout the balloon payload’s solid structures, producing unwanted signals — noise — in the detectors.

Faster, Lighter, Less Expensive

The CASBa, Comprehensive Avionic System for Balloons, aims to replace a system originally developed in the 1980s, said Sarah Wright, suborbital technology lead at NASA Wallops. CASBa will capture, process, and transmit gigabytes rather than the megabytes capacity of the current system. Building it around commercially supplied computer cores also keeps mission costs down while reducing mass, Wright added…

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