Data Acquisition and Power Control System for Thermal Test on Spacecraft at 4m Thermal Vacuum Chamber 2001-01-2245

A computer based data acquisition and power control system has been designed and installed for conducting thermal test at 4M thermal vacuum chamber of ISRO Satellite Centre(ISAC), Bangalore, INDIA. The system consists of four main units viz. Temperature Signal Processing Unit(TSPU), Power and Control Unit(PACU), Spacecraft telemetry and thermal vacuum chamber facility data interface unit and Data Processing Unit(DPU). The system has capability of monitoring 512 thermocouple channels, 700 spacecraft telemetry thermal related parameters, facility parameters including chamber Vacuum level, chamber contamination level using Quartz Crystal Monitor data and 128 numbers of heat-flux/temperature control channels. TSPU and PACU are VME based system. DPU is based on Pentium processor with hot redundancy using Redundant Array Of Inexpensive Disks(RAID) to takeover in case of failure of a server. All the subsystem and their peripherals are networked using TCP/IP on Ethernet. Details of the system configuration, its specification and performance are presented here.