Engineers at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida needed a way to reduce the time and manpower necessary to process signals from a wide variety of sensors during spacecraft launches. They found their solution in the Automated Data Acquisition System - ADAS 5000 - from Lockheed Martin Telemetry & Instrumentation in San Diego.
"Many of the sensors we use are simple, low-level sensors, such as voltage output," explains William Larson, lead engineer for data acquisitions and systems development at Kennedy. "But you also need signal conditioners, and we were spending two to four hours per measurement on each launch to configure these signal conditioners."
Yet the ADAS 5000 "is universal in nature, and is smart enough to match itself to any transducer," Larson continues. "Now we can configure these signal conditioners in a few seconds."
The ADAS 5000 is remotely programmable and provides signal conditioning, A-D conversion, data storage, and data distribution for end-to-end data acquisition. Its universal signal conditioning amplifier plugs into any type of transducer and automatically self-configures to that transducer`s requirements. - J.K.
For more information, contact Chris Fitzsimmons of Lockheed Martin by phone at 619-674-5100, ext. 4028, by fax at 619-674-6145, by mail at 15378 Avenue of Science, San Diego, Calif., 92128-3407, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.ti.lmco.com/daq/.
The Lockheed Martin ADAS 5000 helps gather rocket data quickly.
