When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over East
Texas six months ago, NASA began an unprecedented effort to use IT
to locate and log debris scattered over nearly 1,000 square
miles.
By the time NASA wound down its debris-collection effort in May,
searchers had collected 84,000 pieces of debris - roughly 40% of
the shuttle. Ninety-eight per cent of that debris was "geo-located"
- found by means of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology.
Information about the debris was stored in a Microsoft SQL Server
database. A field data collection program running on
Hewlett-Packard iPaq Pocket PCs was developed.
Roughly 40% of the iPaqs featured an integrated GPS receiver,
which made entry of geo-location data automatic.
At the end of each day, debris teams would synchronise their
data with a SQL Server database. Kristin Ingram, The information
from the Environmental Protection Agency database was merged with a
NASA database which included a shuttle parts list.
he data was then stored in the Shuttle Interagency Debris
Database (SIDD). The SIDD runs on two Dell 8450 servers, each
housing four Pentium III Xeon chips with 2GB of Ram and 18GB of
storage. Additional storage was provided by dual Dell PowerVault
systems with a capacity of 1TB each.
Data replication between the EPA and the SIDD SQL Server
databases was done through bulk-merge replication rather than by
transaction.
SIDD played a key role in refining the debris search daily by
showing patterns in the distribution of key parts within the debris
field. Those patterns helped narrow the search for Columbia's data
recorder.
NASA's earth science information directorate at the Stennis
Space Center helped turn the SIDD data into visual information with
geographical information systems (GIS) technology.
Bob Brewin writes for Computerworld