Telemaxus: A telescience oriented sounding rocket experiment

Abstract

Following the success of the Texus 23 Campaign (November 1989), during which the Teletexus experiment was conducted a more ambitious Telescience experiment was accomodated on the 1991 MAXUS 1 Payload. The fluidynamic experiment on the oscillatory Marangoni flow was performed on board the rocket (launched at Kiruna, Sweden) using a modified TEM-06/4 module. The experiment was fully controlled by the PI (Professor Monti) directly from the Telescience Control Room located at MARS Center (Naples, Italy). The experiment was also aimed to demonstrate the capabilities of Telescience Service that ESA offers to the European Microgravity User Community. Respect to other experiments already tested and assessed during previous Texus missions (14b, 23), the Telescience operation mode included new state-of-art technologies and subsystems to demonstrate capabilities, flexibility and usefulness of this operation concept mainly in the perspective of Columbus utilization. Unfortunately due to a failure of the rocket system, the microgravity condition was not reached during the flight and the fluidynamic results were missed. However, in spite of the tumbling attitude of the rocket, the telescience link was successfully tested and the video/data/audio communication was correctly established between MARS and Esrange. This paper illustrates the technological aspects and gives an overview of the systems/equipments integrated and realized for the experiment control. In the first part the H/W configurations for the experiment monitoring and control, identified by the research team are illustrated. The relevant items of the H/W configuration include: the Telescience Work Stations architecture, the link channels used for the selection, transmission and reception of video/data/commands and the subsystems manufactured to improve the system versatility. The second part deals with the communication link used for transmission between Sweden and Italy of experimental data, facility status, voice, compressed video images, and commands, The role played by the S/W for a complete, comprehensible presentation of the many parameters relevant for the experiment control is discussed in the third part. The S/W, developed by the team, carried out different functions, as data selection and acquisition, graphic visualization, management of data/commands communication, data elaboration, facility/links monitoring, and decision support to PI. In particular the experience acquired during this experiment has demonstrated the importance and usefulness of the decision support, conceived to help the PI at the branch points. Finally the paper summarizes the experiment procedure, the behaviour of the different subsystems and the improvements obtained with respect to previous Texus experiences. The activities were carried out under ESA Contract 9392/91/NL/SF(SC).