Visualization lab opens at Kennedy Space Center
Staff -- Test & Measurement World, 10/1/2003
NASA, United Space Alliance (USA), and Silicon Graphics, Inc. have teamed up to create a high-performing visual film analysis system. It is currently used to review and analyze previous shuttle flight data at the NASA Ice/Debris Team's Image Analysis Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for the shuttle fleet's return to flight.
This lab is an upgrade to NASA's Image Analysis Facility—an upgrade made more urgent after the February 1 Columbia accident. The new lab can produce extremely high-resolution scans from various speeds of 16-mm and 35-mm film, and video taken from the almost 70 cameras at the launch pad. NASA scientists can then analyze and manipulate those images.
The lab will allow NASA scientists to perform preliminary video analysis within hours of a shuttle launch and provide more detailed film analysis the day after launch. With the new system, NASA's Ice/Debris Team now can analyze full-frame, real-time, standard-definition and high-definition video at 1280x720 pixels and can analyze 16-mm and 35-mm film data at 4096x3112 pixels. The system was designed to process 150,000 frames of film and 300,000 frames of video within two weeks of a launch.
Built by SGI Professional Services, the multidisplay system allows engineers to collaborate on the detailed manipulation and evaluation of specific imagery. It includes a 7-ft. display powered by the 12-processor SGI Onyx 3000 rack-mount visualization supercomputer with two InfiniteReality4 graphics pipes.
To produce digital images, technicians scan film through a scanner. They can then digitally pan, tilt, and zoom around the frame to add real-time effects, isolate images, and filter images. The system can also do film restoration, if necessary.
The system has a RAID storage array with a capacity of 30 Tbytes for storing images. With this capacity, the system can easily store the estimated 10 Tbytes—15 Tbytes of raw film data created during a single launch. Users can access the data from the array at a rate of 2 Gbytes/s. http://www.sgi.com.
