Development Flight Instrumentation for the Redesigned Solid Rocket Booster for the Space Shuttle Program

Abstract

The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville Alabama, decided in July 1986, to upgrade the development flight instrumentation (DFI) system to monitor the performance of the redesigned solid rocket boosters. On September 29, 1988 Space Shuttle Discovery was successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida with the redesigned solid rocket boosters carrying the upgraded DFI system which consists of 24 electronic black boxes, over 200 sensors, and 91 cable assemblies. Many contractors supplied parts of the DRI system to NASA Marshall, two thirds of the black boxes were designed and developed by the Aydin Vector Division. The remaining boxes were supplied by Kodak Data Tape, in Pasadena, California and Teledyne Brown Engineering, in Huntsville, Alabama. This paper will show the entire DFI system with particular emphasis on the major subsystems such as the PCM subsystem which consisted of one Programmable Master Encoder and three Remote Slave Encoders, the Frequency Division Multiplexer and the Wideband signal conditioner units. These units conditioned all of the information received from the sensors and multiplexed this data into one encoded PCM data stream and two independent FM composite outputs.