Government

Planet Anycast Station

Producing TV out in the desert with NASA

Education is an integral part of the activities at NASA, where the contributions of space travel need to be communicated to the public as well as throughout the U.S. education system.

According to NASA, every year, as part of its commitment to K-12, secondary and collegiate studies, the NASA Education Department spends two weeks in the Arizona desert at Meteor Crater near Flagstaff, and it produces a series of live, two-way one-hour television shows about the latest developments in robotics, land-vehicles, and space suit technology.

The NASA Public Affairs Office supports this project annually and takes on the responsibility of producing, editing and distributing the content to schools throughout the world. The programs are shot with a collection of lipstick, Fire-Wired® DV, and studio cameras - all of which needed to look consistent - and all of which were, this year, interfaced with the Sony Anycast Station™ System, a highly-portable video switcher, audio mixer, with a built-in large LCD display, and a streaming encoder and built-in server.

According to Mark Baird, television engineer at NASA's Public Affairs Department, "This is all produced in one of the most extreme environments on earth. It demonstrates how NASA puts all its equipment to the most punishing of tests. And, indirectly, it puts all the video gear that we used to similar extremes." Two, live, distance-learning programs are cast per day, fed directly from the Anycast Station system through a unique distance learning codec, then fed via Cat5 to an IP satellite truck supplied by Glenn Space Center, where it was directed back to mission control before being bridged out to the schools, Baird explains.

The Anycast Station system served as the switcher for the multiple cameras, the audio control, and it was even used to control some system robotics. The team recorded all the camera feeds ISO on a hard drive, enabling them to edit the shows at a later date.

When we were doing this project with a standard switcher, we'd spend two hours on setup," Baird adds. "This time I spent only 30-minutes every morning. The system was lighter and less expensive to fly in and out. Most importantly, even in the grit and dirt of the desert, we had no failures."

The last day, Baird relates, there was a huge rain storm and the team had 30 minutes to tear down its outside studio and move it indoors, including completely reconfiguring the system, balancing the color, changing from studio cameras to DV. "Because the Anycast Station system can take anything and is all there in one unit - you don't worry about genlocks and system timing - and we were still able to get on air at on time."