NASA SOFIA airborne astronomy project to use avionics components from One Stop Systems

ESCONDIDO, Calif., 8 Jan. 2012. High-altitude atmospheric researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., needed data recorders and embedded computing servers for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) project. They found their solution from One Stop Systems Inc. in Escondido, Calif.

One Stop Systems has delivered several of its MDA-T5 data recorders and 3U servers to NASA Dryden for the SOFIA astronomy project. The rugged MIL-STD disk array is a RAID storage system with dual removable drive packs and dual SBB 2.0-compliant high-speed controllers, each with two Fibre Channel 8-gigabit-per-second inputs.

The MDA-T5 moves data over the Fibre Channel connection to the 3U server at transfers speeds faster than 700 megabytes per second, company officials say. The dual six-disk removable drive packs in the MDA-T5 help users remove the data quickly from the aircraft and transfer it to ground systems while maintaining the RAID configuration for each drive pack.

SOFIA is a joint program by NASA and the German Aerospace Center to complement the Hubble, Spitzer, Herschel, and James Webb space telescopes and major Earth-based telescopes. SOFIA has a German-built 100-inch far-infrared telescope weighing 20 tons mounted in the rear fuselage of a modified Boeing 747SP jumbo jet.

For more information contact One Stop Systems online at www.onestopsystems.com, or NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/home.