Innovative airborne experiments tools for Science Users

The SAFIRE, a joint service unit of CNRS, Météo-France and CNES in charge of environment observation campaigns, aeronautical R&D projects, as well as preparation and validation of space missions, is striving to provide state of the art infrastructure and services to its Science Users. Hence, SAFIRE has always supported development of common standards and use of best practices for hosting Science Payloads in its airborne infrastructure.

In the recent years, airborne scientific operations have been significantly improved through digitalization. However, growing number of individual equipment embarked still leads to tedious work when attempting to integrate together acquisition, measurement and processing tools or to manage the experimental set up as a whole. To answer this challenge, SAFIRE has proposed to use MQTT protocol messaging to allow an easier flow of data between on board equipment.

Collaborating with the SAFIRE, ATMOSPHERE developed MQTT-based solutions aiming to provide automated storage of measurement data in specific formats, and live monitoring of data produced by various equipment. These solutions can be easily interfaced with other MQTT compliant equipment and allow more centralized data management and processing.

The paper will describe the benefits of the new SAFIRE airborne architecture and will review early results from latest measurements campaigns. It will also describe how the exploitation of data monitoring and processing tools using MQTT-based communication can benefit the scientific community.