MUSC information system ARIADNE: a consistent tool for support of experiment planning, execution and scientific...

One of the main tasks of DLR-MUSC (Microgravity User Support Center) is to accompany an experiment's complete life-cycle, thus supporting the investigators. This task starts with the preparation of experiments, continues with their execution and finally leads to the evaluation of the respective measurement results. A computer-based information system facilitates these tasks. Considerable effort has been taken in order to make a detailed as well as modular design--as a result the system can now be applied for any mission. ARIADNE mainly supports three phases, all using the same consistent database. 1. The first phase of experiment preparation is supported by--the acquisition and maintenance of general and basic data by user entries into the database, and the support of the integration of partially similar experiment proposals into a timeline as planned which is composed by activities. 2. The support during experiment execution consists of--real-time data acquisition and control (i.e. on-line database generation and display after processing) including experiment monitoring, enabling of fast replanning. 3. The support ARIADNE provides for experiment evaluation includes--the selection of series of measurements belonging to the specified experiment (parts), further processing and evaluation of the collected data, which must partly be done in real-time and partly post-mission and, creation of back-up's of the processing results. The ARIADNE database consists of a relational ORACLE-part (for numerical and character data), a bibliographic part, a program-library, and a realtime-part (BAPAS). The open design of ARIADNE allows interfaces to stored special data (such as graphics, images, archives) as well as several interfaces to other systems, such as CUIS, MARS-MDB, EXPRES, etc.