CHARLOTTE, NC (CWC PR) – Curtiss-Wright Controls, Inc. today announced that it has received a contract from Alenia Aermacchi S.p.A. to supply rugged data acquisition subsystems for use in the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV). Under the contract, Curtiss-Wright Controls will supply Alenia Aermacchi with its Acra KAM-500, Acra PCM recorder and Acra network switch for the re-entry vehicle data handling and telemetry subsystem. The Curtiss-Wright Controls Avionics & Electronics (CWC-AE) division’s data acquisition, networking and recording products will enable the IXV mission to acquire data to test new re-entry vehicle technologies.
The contract for the design and implementation phases of the program is valued at $3 million. Shipments of qualified spaceflight hardware for the IXV mission will be completed in 2012. The IXV industrial team is developing proposals for follow on missions that utilize a fully re-useable variant of the IXV.
“We are very pleased that Alenia Aermacchi selected our rugged, mission-critical data acquisition and recording technology for use in this exciting new low-Earth orbiting re-entry vehicle,” said David Adams, Co-Chief Operating Officer of Curtiss-Wright Corporation. “The use of our products on the IXV represents the first adoption of a cost-effective high performance commercial off the shelf (COTS) Ethernet network solution for a re-entry vehicle space mission by the European Space Agency.”
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