NASA Glenn-designed space hardware will test new communication technologies - Plain Dealer

Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain DealerThe Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) testbed sits in a dust-free "clean room" at NASA's Glenn Research Center, awaiting shipment to Japan. Its white protective shipping cover is to the rear right.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The double shifts, daily 8 a.m. meetings, looming deadlines and missed holidays are over. For the first time in . . . well, she can't remember how long, aerospace engineer Diane Malarik finally got a good night's sleep last week.

The $105 million piece of space hardware that project manager Malarik and hundreds of NASA Glenn Research Center employees have designed and built during the past five years is ready for its long journey into orbit.

The silvery, air conditioner-sized, antenna-studded box known as the Space Communications and Navigation Testbed, or ScaN, is packed in its protective metal shell. Starting Monday, a truck, a Tokyo-bound jet, a barge, a ferry to the Tanegashima Space Center and eventually a Japanese rocket will deliver it to the International Space Station, where NASA hopes the compact lab will help pave the way for a new kind of communications technology in space and on Earth.

NASAThe International Space Station.

Though Glenn is NASA's go-to place for space communications expertise, SCaN pushed the center's capabilities to the limit. Twice, NASA nearly pulled the plug on the project. The difficulty of conceiving its futuristic radios, then building them to withstand the brutal conditions of space, took so long that SCaN missed its ride on the space shuttle fleet, which NASA retired in 2011. It almost lost its backup seat on the Japanese space agency's rocket, too, until last year's tsunami delayed the launch schedule.

"Several years ago, I'm not sure we were all convinced we would make it," Glenn director Ray Lugo said.

In the end, though, the Glenn staff's willingness to work nights, weekends and holidays to deliver SCaN burnished the center's reputation as a can-do shop.

"They worked miracles," said NASA deputy associate administrator Badri Younes, who visited Glenn Friday to help celebrate SCaN's completion. "We had a team of doers . . . that stuck with it night and day at the expense of their own personal lives to make it happen." In the eyes of NASA headquarters, Glenn "grew a notch or two."

NASAA schematic view of SCaN.

SCaN will launch sometime this summer, bound for the International Space Station. A robotic supply craft will carry it close to the huge orbiting facility. The station's mechanical arms then will unload the testbed and maneuver it into place on one of the station's support trusses. There, its antennas will have an unobstructed aim upward at NASA's higher-orbiting communications satellites, and downward to ground relay stations.

SCaN is meant to test a technology called software defined radio that could help NASA change the way its spacecraft and satellites and their controllers communicate with each other. The approach also may find its way to commercial devices such as cell phones. It's already in use in some military radios. Here's the basic idea.

Remember the switchover to digital TV in 2009, when then end of analog broadcasting forced viewers without cable to buy and install new converter boxes and antennas?

Upgrading is a pain here on Earth, but imagine if you had to lug all that replacement gear into space. When technology changes, or when components fail, swapping out the radios that spacecraft and satellites rely on is wildly expensive, and sometimes downright impossible.

NASANASA's space communication network.

As a solution, NASA is experimenting with software defined radios, which use computer code instead of electronic hardware to do typical radio things such as tuning, frequency modulation and signal-filtering. Instead of having to physically change out hardware to make a fix or an upgrade, an engineer can just upload new programming to a software defined radio.

Malarik likens the process to installing a new app on a smart phone, immediately giving it new capabilities. Radios based on software can be reconfigured on the fly, and from long distances. That saves money, extends their usability, and allows them to adapt as technology changes and new bandwidths become available. The technology will "allow you to do things that scientists only dream of today," Younes said.

Reliable voice and data communication are vital to the success of space missions. Imagine if Neil Armstrong's immortal "One small step for a man" declaration had been cut off in mid-sentence, or if Mariner 4 hadn't been able to beam back the first TV images from Mars. Radios relay commands, navigation signals and other important stuff. So NASA wants to rigorously test software defined radio – to "wring out the bugs and buy down the risk," as Malarik describes it – before putting it into regular use.

That's what SCaN is for. It contains three software defined radios, each with different capabilities. Two of them were developed and partly paid for by commercial manufacturers – Harris Corporation and aerospace giant General Dynamics – who hope to get in on software defined radio's ground floor. The third, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, can communicate with global positioning system satellites on the previously unused L5 frequency, and may more precisely pinpoint the International Space Station's position, aiding navigation maneuvers.

NASANASA Glenn scientists and engineers manage space station experiments from the Telescience Support Center.

Besides its own testing, NASA will make SCaN available to companies, universities and government agencies such as the military, so they can try out new communications software. Engineers will manage the testbed from Glenn's Telescience Support Center, a smaller version of Houston's famous Mission Control Center, with live hookups to the space station and NASA's satellite networks.

Glenn personnel have put SCaN through a grueling test program to make sure it works, baking and freezing it in a vacuum chamber that mimics orbital conditions, and violently shaking it on a vibrating plate to simulate the rumble of rocket launch.

Though most of the hard work is done, they won't rest easy until it's up and running. "It'll be good to get it up in space," said principal investigator Richard Reinhart.

Befitting its rocky birth, SCaN's journey to the Japanese launch site faces some hurdles.

"There's snow in the Alps of Japan – who even knew there were Alps in Japan," Malarik said. And an Alaskan volcano called Mount Cleveland (of course) is threatening to erupt, which could disrupt the flight path of the cargo plane delivering SCaN to Tokyo.

But the Glenn staff is confident things will work out.

"This thing is a tank," Malarik said. "I couldn't be prouder of the team and the accomplishments of the center. I've never worked on a project more challenging, or more gratifying, than this one."

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