Aerospace Engineering Programs

[ Support History | LACE | Clementine | MSTI2&3 | Stardust | NEMO | NATO's Rapid Response ]

CLEMENTINE PROGRAM

Clementine was a joint DOD/NASA effort that was undertaken to test light-weight sensors and electronics for military and civil applications. The BMDO/NRL/LLNL team designed, developed and launched the Clementine spacecraft in two years. The Clementine spacecraft imaged the whole Moon at high resolution in 11 spectral bands, and partial coverage in other 6 spectral bands. For a period of 2 months over 5,000 Moon images were received on every orbit, i.e. every 5 hours. Most of the data was compressed in the satellite using JPEG type of compression. During the mission ACT processed over 240 Gbytes of multispectral image data.

ACT personnel were responsible for all the front end image processing effort related to the Mission Operations of the Clementine satellite program. ACT's support to Clementine included management, planning and execution of tasks related to:

• design and evaluation of data compression parameters sets to be used by the Clementine program.
• development of custom Image Processing Software
• image processing system integration using low cost high performance hardware. ACT's PC based MSHELL workstations were used to perform all the Mission operations image processing.
• 24 Hours/day image processing support for
  • quick-look sensor data analysis, i.e. decompress every image and compute basic image statistics used to establish that sensors were operating within the right performance bounds
  • pointing assessment - compute pointing and validate this by performing map projections
  • archival and formatting of all of the image data into the Planetary Data System Format (PDS)
  • production of quick-look results (radiometric, images, mosaics)

ACT established the equivalent of a Remote Access Center for Clementine Data. This center allowed members of the Mission Operations group to have access to all image data over the local area networks, including the INTERNET.

ACT's work during Clementine resulted in a special recognition given by NASA Headquarters to Dr. Erick Malaret.

At the present time ACT is under contract with NASA working on the inflight calibration of the Clementine cameras.