GE Intelligent Platforms (NYSE: GE) today announced that the company’s
video processing technology had been deployed on board NASA’s Global
Hawk as part of the agency’s Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3)
Mission. The Global Hawk aircraft is unique in its research capabilities
because of its long range and flight duration, providing extraordinary
capabilities for scientific and commercial ventures.
The rugged full motion video (FMV) compression appliance, the GE daq8580,
provides visual situational awareness on the missions, which study
hurricanes and wildfires. The missions are a joint partnership between
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and see the autonomous Global Hawk
deployed to conduct unprecedented atmospheric research initiatives.
The Global Hawk aircraft can reach altitudes above 60,000 feet and cover
more than 20,000 km in extended 30 hour missions. It has been involved
in several science campaigns each with specific information gathering
objectives. The scope of these missions has varied from high altitude
monitoring of ozone depleting molecules, to the study of large cyclones
in the arctic influencing weather patterns.
“NASA selected GE’s daq8580 video compression technology to enable
multiple video capabilities on Global Hawk missions,” said Don Sullivan,
Biospheric Science Engineer, NASA. “It allows us to ingest high
bandwidth, high resolution video streams from the onboard sensors and
compress the data by factors as large as 100:1. The reduced bandwidth
video feed can then be transmitted over the communication link to the
ground station for observation and analysis with negligible impact on
image quality. We expect to deploy several more units over the next two
years.”
The daq8580 compression platform minimizes system complexity as well as
the size, weight and power (SWaP) requirements, all while increasing
operational reliability.
“This FMV compression appliance provided three key capabilities for the
NASA missions,” said Rod Rice, General Manager, Military/Aerospace
Products, GE Intelligent Platforms. “First was very high performance
with very low latency, ensuring that optimum quality captured images
were processed and transmitted in the shortest possible time, and with
minimal bandwidth usage. The second was the daq8580’s open architecture,
allowing it to be easily and cost-effectively integrated within Global
Hawk’s other systems. Third was its support for CameraLink, an industry
standard protocol which allows for the support of a broad range of high
resolution cameras, giving NASA substantial flexibility.”
The daq8580 is a rugged multichannel FMV compression appliance for
processing, server and storage applications in harsh, constrained
environments. It is designed to address the challenges of processing,
transporting and storing full motion video through video encoding, and
can interface with a wide variety of analog and digital I/O and process
standard video formats up to 1080p30 as well as computer resolutions up
to 1600x1200.
It provides exceptional compute power for video
compression/decompression, video switching, format conversions, scaling,
blending and many other video processing functions while enabling
multichannel video compression and decompression for over 100x reduction
in bandwidth without sacrificing video quality.
For more information click here.
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