ACT - Aerospace Engineering Programs

Aerospace Engineering Programs

LACE PROGRAM

Rocket plume image as seen from space, in the UV portion of the spectrum, by the LACE/UVPI imaging sensor (see Aviation Week issue of April 1991).

ACT was under contract to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to provide mission operations and data analysis support for all of the image processing efforts related to the SDIO LACE satellite program.

The Ultraviolet Plume Instrument (UVPI) was an SDIO plume-tracking instrument flown on the NRL's LACE satellite. The UVPI's primary mission was to collect images of rocket plumes in the ultraviolet wavelengths. Its secondary mission was to collect BACKGROUND image data of the Earth, the Earth's limb and celestial objects in the near and middle ultraviolet wavebands. The UVPI was successfully used to collect image data from four rocket launches, one ground burn of a rocket, and many observations.

In the LACE program ACT was responsible for the:

system integration of all the ground based image processing hardware with customized workstations used for data reduction
data reduction and analysis of all image data
archival and formatting of the image data (calibrated up to 1 gigabyte of image data per day). Calibrated data was archived in the FITS format at the NRL/BCD
inflight calibration of the instruments and comparison to the ground calibration,
detailed analysis of the observed four rocket plumes, and documentation of procedures and results .

Delta II rocket used by for LACE.