JPL's Image Processing Laboratory HistoryImage Processing Laboratory 1966-1984The image processing laboratory (IPL) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory began in 1966 to retrieve and process video images from spacecraft. Software called VICAR (Video Image Communication And Retrieval) was developed to process the images on an IBM 360 computer. VICAR was written by Howard Frieden, Bob Nathan, Stan Bressler, John Campbell, Tom King and Ed Efron. This was a batch oriented system with data input from magnetic tape, command input from punched cards and output to magnetic tape. Images were displayed on a video film converter which was built by LINC. In the mid-1970s, time sharing was introduced into the IPL when IBM TSO was released. In the late-1970s, PDP-11 peripheral processors were added to manage image displays. The VICAR algorithms continued to be developed and improved. This phase of the IPL supported the following flight projects: In 1979, IPL merged with MTIS and continued to support real-time and systematic production for Voyager.Multimission Image Processing Laboratory 1984-1995In 1984, the Multimission Image Processing Laboratory (MIPL) was formed. New hardware was acquired in the form of Digital Equipment Corporation VAX 11/780s. VICAR programs were ported to run under the Transportable Applications Executive (TAE). The new facility provided for batch or interactive processing. The hardware consisted of multiple VAX computers clustered with a common disk system, line and page oriented video terminals (VT100), image display hardware (by Gould, Adage and Ramtek), film recorders and hardcopy printers, disk (magnetic and optical) and tape (reel and cassette) archives, and network connections to the "outside world". This phase has supported the following flight projects:
Multimission Image Processing System - 1995 and beyondThe new Multimission Image Processing Subsystem is a distributed system with Digital Alpha and Sun servers and Sun workstations. The VICAR image processing subsystem has been ported to all of the platforms and maintains its TAE command line interface as well as a new GUI based interface. Film recorders and hardcopy devices are available to all the workstations on the network. The files are centrally stored on a storage server consisting of high speed magnetic disk and archives on CD-ROM and magnetic tape cassettes. Since 1995 MIPS has supported the following missions/projects: |
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Questions about MIPL can be referred to Laverne Hall, the Instrument Operations Systems Project Element Manager. Webmaster: Shari.Mayer Last update: November 22, 2006
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