Stonewater Chosen To Be the Sensory Information Platform for 2008 HALE Demonstration Flights
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS—March 3, 2008—Stonewater Control Systems has been chosen to provide its mobile device management platform, Control 1st, for 2008 High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) test flights. Stonewater's Control 1st has the ability to both persistently monitor the health of mobile network nodes and consolidate data from disparate sensors in one application.
The HALE Proving Station Demonstration is the Aerostat testbed led by the Army Space and Missile Defense Battle Lab (ASMDBL) with participants from private industry and government. The testbed consists of a High-Altitude Long Endurance platform of telemetry and control systems mounted to a 23,000-cubic-foot aerostat (tethered blimp), 25 feet in diameter and 75 feet long. Its purpose is to enhance HALE capabilities for communications, remote-sensing, and photovoltaic/power systems in order to assist U.S. military, civil and commercial concerns with development of a persistent capability in support of their various missions.
In the 2008 Aerostat flights, Stonewater will send acoustic, weather and chemical data transported securely and wirelessly through a Western DataCom Cisco mobile access router. The data is collected by a sensor array integrated by Sanchez Industrial Design. The data from the sensors and the forensic data about internal sensor and router functions is collected, monitored and alarmed on by Stonewater's Control 1st device management software platform.
Satellite and sub-orbital imagery are crucial to our understanding of surface and subsurface processes. Earth's environment is frequently characterized by abundant cloud cover that inhibits imaging of land and ocean processes from satellites. This is especially true for those satellite imaging systems that must be "tasked" to acquire imagery of specific areas. Suborbital (aircraft, aerostat and airship) imagery has the added benefits of longer loiter, higher-spatial resolution and shorter atmospheric path lengths resulting in higher-quality data. Each tasked satellite imaging attempt costs thousands of dollars and many are not successful due to cloud cover. Moreover, the calibration and validation of those rare and expensive satellite images is inhibited by the same weather and illumination conditions.
In order to increase the likelihood of successfully and affordably imaging areas for a variety of environmental applications, and to improve the calibration and validation of satellite images Stonewater is assisting in providing a modular, light-weight, compact, robust, and highly automated suite of sensors that can be mobilized quickly and easily on an ad hoc basis on a variety of sub-orbital HALE platforms.
About Stonewater Control Systems
Stonewater Control Systems is a privately held company based in Evanston, Illinois. Stonewater provides turnkey solutions for the management of mobile wireless devices and for communicating real-time sensory data from multiple sources onto a common platform. For more information, please visit http://www.stonewatercontrols.com.
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