NASA – Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

Client: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / MMS-FPI

Project: Program an automated test station for Dual Electron Spectrometer test and calibration.

Solution: The MMS mission is a fleet of four identical spacecraft, each flying four identical Dual Electron Spectrometers. The challenge was to build a highly automated, high-throughput test station to perform serial test and calibration on all 16 identical DES instruments. Our solution used LabView to control automated positioning of the Optical Calibration Fixture and settings on various electronic test equipment, to provide a flexible and intuitive user interface, to import and parse .xls files that are used to script the actual test, and to log test station, result, and configuration files for future recovery and post-test analysis.