News Releases
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NASA National Scientific Balloon Facility Successfully Integrates
BiTMICRO's Solid State Disk Storage Technology
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PALESTINE, Texas -- Nov. 19, 2001 -- National Scientific
Balloon Facility (NSBF), a NASA facility that provides the services of launching
high altitude research balloons, tracking, and recovering the scientific
experiments suspended beneath them, for universities and NASA centers from all
over the world, successfully incorporated BiTMICRO
® Networks' flash drive
Solid State disk (SSD) solutions for use in NSBF research, engineering, and
operational support.
The NSBF Palestine Facility provides complete balloon operations services and
engineering support to the United States and foreign scientific communities. The
services provided include inflation, launching of the balloon, tracking and
recovery of the payload, and telecommand and data retrieval with reliable
electronics systems.
Some of the NSBF areas of engineering support are the design of balloon systems,
research in balloon materials, electronics design, gondola design and thermal
analysis. Also included are power system design, instrumentation design and
integration, and recovery system design.
"We have an extremely experienced team. It's a great advantage to have such a
team that designs and develops the balloon systems, but also knows how to
identify and use new technology to our advantage. When we required a more
reliable storage solution for long duration balloon flights, BiTMICRO's E-Disk
®
was our choice," said Bryan Stilwell, NSBF Long Duration Balloon Group
Supervisor.
"All of the ideas, designs, plans, approaches, and hard work, which were
embodied in our balloon systems and the flight operations, were proven to be
sound and real "winners". Every design aspect of our systems with BiTMICRO's
E-Disks
® functioned successfully as planned," commented Danny Ball, NSBF site
manager.
"The maximum and comprehensive success criteria for our balloon flights with
E-Disks
® were met and exceeded, including our requirement for 120,000 feet
systems operating altitude. These flight tests are steps that will usher us in
new exciting times for scientific ballooning," added Ball.
In over 25 years of operation, the NSBF has launched more than 1700 balloons for
35 universities, 23 other research agencies, and 33 foreign groups. During this
span of years, there has been a dramatic increase in sophistication of
experiments and demands for services.
Some types of research for which balloons are used are Cosmic Ray studies, Gamma
Ray and X-Ray Astronomy, Optical and Ultra-Violet Astronomy, Infrared Astronomy,
Atmospheric Sciences, Magnetospherics, and Micrometeorite Particles.
In addition to the Palestine operation, the NSBF conducts scientific ballooning
operations from various remote sites in the U.S. and several foreign countries.
The Facility is recognized on the international level as being one of the most
advanced organizations of its type in the world.
"This resounding and unmitigated success of incorporating our E-Disks
® to NSBF's
new balloon flight systems was the direct result of the teamwork among the
best-of-breed dedicated NSBF staff and BiTMICRO
® engineers. We understand NSBF's
data storage requirements. We responded with storage solutions that meet their
needs," said Rudy Bruce, BiTMICRO
® president.
BiTMICRO's first generation E-Disk
® flashdrive SSD based on patented FlashBus
technology offers unprecedented sustained random read and write transfer rates
of up to 68 megabytes a second and random access times of less than 48
microseconds. The E-Disk's flash drive storage capacity ranges between 128
megabytes and 77 gigabytes.
Each E-Disk
® flashdisk solid state drive device is configured to have the same
form, fit and function as hard disk drives (HDD), but without the need for large
power heat dissipation, noise protection and environmental hardening. They are
offered with SCSI, IDE or Fibre Channel interface in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDD
form factors.
The E-Disks
®, utilizing BiTMICRO's FlashBus technology, are fully compatible with
Linux, Solaris, Windows, MacOS and LynxOS using standard drivers. They also
support AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, NetBSD, OS/2, QNX, VxWorks, SCO Unixware and
OpenServer, Solaris x86 and Tru64.
For more information about NSBF commercial ballooning, including the
High-Altitude Ballooning Initiative and Suborbital Programs, visit
http://master.nsbf.nasa.gov.
For BiTMICRO
® Networks E-Disk
® technology information, call 510-74E-DISK /
510-743-3475 or visit http://www.bitmicro.com.
About NASA National Scientific Balloon Facility
The National Scientific Balloon Facility (http://master.nsbf.nasa.gov) was
established in Boulder, Colorado in 1961 under the auspices of the National
Science Foundation. In October, 1987, the NASA contract to operate the NSBF was
awarded to the Physical Science Laboratory under the auspices of New Mexico
State University located in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The contract is administered
by Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC) Wallops Flight Facility. The NSBF has
the following three-fold mission: 1) Plan and develop facilities and provide
operations service to meet the approved ballooning requirements of the
scientific community. 2) Perform the necessary research and development to meet
future scientific ballooning requirements. 3) Provide consulting services in the
field of scientific ballooning.
About BiTMICRO Networks
BiTMICRO Networks, Inc. (http://www.bitmicro.com), a privately held California
corporation, is the world's premier supplier of high performance solid state
disk, flash disk drive, and storage systems and management solutions. BiTMICRO's
storage solutions offer unmatched performance, data availability, and
manageability across a spectrum of platforms from entry systems to super
computers. BiTMICRO
® product lines are ideal for military, aerospace,
telecommunications, transportation, e-commerce, embedded systems, expanding
Internet communications and enterprise installations such as servers, JBOD,
network attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN) and RAID.
Note to Editors: BiTMICRO
®, E-Disk
®, FlashBus™ and BiTMICRO
Networks
® are trademarks of BiTMICRO Networks, Inc. Others are trademarks of
their respective companies or other countries.
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