The WARP: wideband advanced recorder processor for the New Millennium Program EO-1

NASA´s New Millennium Program (NMP) will sponsor a series of small scientific spacecraft whose purpose is to demonstrate new technologies and methods of spacecraft design by using unique teaming arrangements between government and industry. EO-1, the first Earth Orbiter satellite in the NMP, will perform the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) mission. The ALI, combined with other instruments aboard EO-1, will output nearly 1 Gigabit per second of raw science data. An innovative data system, the Wideband Advanced Recorder Processor (WARP), is being developed to handle these very high data ingest rates. In keeping with the philosophy of the EO-1 mission, the WARP will use “best commercial practices” in its design guidelines. The WARP will feature extensive use of new technology including the Spaceborne Fiber Optic Data Bus (SFODB), Chip-on-Board surface mounted memory components, and stacked multi-die wafer segments of Dynamic RAM. The WARP implements a scalable architecture that can be applied to future missions requiring a Solid State Recorder (SSR) and a high performance science data processor. The WARP represents a significant advance over previous spaceflight SSRs. This paper describes the WARP and its capabilities