The McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper Experimental vehicle was designed built, and flown in 24 months. An entire system including a reusable flight vehicle, ground support systems. and operations and support approach. had to he developed. To achieve this aggressive schedule and meet demanding program goals without compromising design integrity, a series of rapid prototyping guidelines was established. and the project was organized into an integrated product team. Drawing preparation and release schedules were synchronized with manufacturing needs in mind. Technicians cross-trained in fabrication electrical, and assembly processes were empowered to decide on best methods. savings of up to 80% in cycle time, from start of planning to part completion, were achieved. An integrated design environment process, called rapid prototyping and integrated design system, was developed to take maximum advantage of available tools. Automated software code generators, computer-aided software engineering design tools and other state-of-the-art elements achieved an estimated 80% cost and 33% time savings. The system also demonstrated that it could he maintained by a team of under 30 with a dedicated flight operations crew of three.

NASA-Marshall has recently designed a Lightning Imaging Sensor. This instrument. scheduled for a near-future scientific observatory flight. has been designed to study thc distribution and variability of total lightning on a global basis. It consists of a staring imager optimized to locate and detect lightning with storm-scale resolution of 5-10 km over a large region (600x600 km) of the Earth’s .surface. The field of view is .sufficient to observe a point on the Earth or a cloud for 80 sec, enough to estimate the flashing rate of many storms.

The instrument records the time of occurrence of a lightning event measures the radiant energy, and estimates the location. A real-time event processor (RTFP) is used to determine when a lightning flash occurs, even in thc presence of bright sunlit clouds. Weak lightning .signals that occur during the day are hard to detect because of background illumination The RTEP will remove the background signal, enabling the system to detect weak lightning and achieve a 90% detection efficiency.