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Stosic, Dorothy

Publications and source records attributed to Stosic, Dorothy.

The 2009 Mars Telecom Orbiter Mission

This paper provides an overview of the Mars Telecom Orbiter (MTO) mission, and is an update to the paper presented at last year’s conference. Launched in 2009, MTO will provide Mars-to-Earth relay services for NASA missions arriving at Mars between 2010 and 2020, enabling far higher science data return and lowering the telecom and operations costs for these missions. MTO carries an optical communications payload, which will demonstrate downlink bit rates from 1 Mbps up to and possibly exceeding 30 Mbps. MTO will also demonstrate the ability to autonomously navigate, and to search for and rendezvous with an orbiting sample, in preparation for NASA’s proposed Mars Sample Return Mission. A to-be-defined science instrument will also be carried.

Boroson, Don

Scalable Multiprocessor for High-Speed Computing in Space

A report discusses the continuing development of a scalable multiprocessor computing system for hard real-time applications aboard a spacecraft. "Hard realtime applications" signifies applications, like real-time radar signal processing, in which the data to be processed are generated at "hundreds" of pulses per second, each pulse "requiring" millions of arithmetic operations. In these applications, the digital processors must be tightly integrated with analog instrumentation (e.g., radar equipment), and data input/output must be synchronized with analog instrumentation, controlled to within fractions of a microsecond. The scalable multiprocessor is a cluster of identical commercial-off-the-shelf generic DSP (digital-signal-processing) computers plus generic interface circuits, including analog-to-digital converters, all controlled by software. The processors are computers interconnected by high-speed serial links. Performance can be increased by adding hardware modules and correspondingly modifying the software. Work is distributed among the processors in a parallel or pipeline fashion by means of a flexible master/slave control and timing scheme. Each processor operates under its own local clock; synchronization is achieved by broadcasting master time signals to all the processors, which compute offsets between the master clock and their local clocks.

Lux, James