ATLANTA: NASA’s Stennis Space Center recently began updating much of its rocket engine test equipment, including its video systems, including the Apella video recording system that NASA acquired from Video Technics, Inc.

The decision was made to move into digital recording where cameras in blast resistant housings film the testing of rockets to provide a record of the testing events. The cameras on the test stand provide surveillance for the entire facility, but are also used during rocket testing, which has a test cycle that ranges from once or twice a week to once every two weeks. During a test, cameras feed video to the 24 video server inputs provided by Video Technics’ six Apella SDS eight-channel networked servers for a total of 24 record and 24 playback channels.

Rocket engine tests can be expensive and sometimes impossible to repeat, so it’s necessary to run the solution in parallel by recording the same camera feeds to multiple channels. This flexibility in user configuration provides more redundancy and greater security when needed. In fact, during a recent test of a new rocket engine, the J2X, which was tested for 500 seconds, the VT solution recorded the video from all of the cameras, and captured all of the digital video.