Digital Extravehicular Activity Radio aimed for space
Carl Dietrich and Jeff Reed are leading a project for AeroAstro, Inc. to develop a digital extravehicular activity radio (DEVAR) for manned space exploration.
Doctoral student Sahana Raghunandan is developing infrastructure and application software that runs on the general processing module of the radio to interface with signal processing and radio frequency modules under development. Other Tech students contributing to the project are: Hoda Darwish, Dileep Kumaraswamy, and Lillian Le.
A byproduct of this effort is Open Space Radio, an open-source implementation based on NASA’s STRS standard for software defined radio (SDR). Availability of this software is expected to foster SDR education, research, and prototyping similar to that of ECE’s OSSIE open-source implementation based on the U.S. Department of Defense Software Communications Architecture.