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Our Excel Training History with NASA
EMAGENIT has had a 20 + year
relationship with NASA starting in the mid 90's. Over the years,
EMAGENIT's founder David Hooper has taught Excel VBA courses for:
- NASA JPL Team X
- NASA Johnson Space Center
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- NASA Langley Research Center
- NASA Michoud Assembly Facility
We have also trained
individual NASA personnel in our public courses from NASA JPL, NASA
Goddard, NASA Michoud and NASA Johnson Space Flight center.
NASA Mars MSL Rover Microsoft Excel VBA Project
NASA JPL Microsoft Excel VBA Project - The Problem
NASA JPL approached EMAGENIT with the following engineering problem: Develop a conceptual design environment
in Microsoft Excel VBA for Windows and Excel VBA for Mac that would allow various NASA JPL programs written for the Mars Rover in C to have
a better more flexible user interface and also be able to communicate with each other passing design information. These programs acting in
unison along with the EMAGENIT Excel VBA interface were to allow NASA JPL to rapidly simulate, early in the conceptual design process, the
power usage of future Mars rovers and the rover’s mission profile for each day. It was called the Mission Scenario Design Workbench.
NASA JPL Microsoft Excel VBA Project - How We Did It
Using a combination of Microsoft Excel, Visual Basic for Applications, C, Pearl Script, Unix Script and Apple Script among
other things, EMAGENIT and its associated JPL team were able to develop an integrated design environment in Microsoft Excel that allows JPL mission
planners to rapidly simulate a conceptual Mars missions for future rovers. As you noticed from the list just presented, everything used in the program
was “off the shelf” allowing it to be developed and tested rapidly. Most important, the program was designed to run in both Excel for Mac and Excel
for Windows.
NASA JPL Microsoft Excel VBA Project - Why Did We Use Microsoft Excel?
Simple,
Microsoft Excel's unmatched versatility. Microsoft Excel in
combination with Visual Basic for Applications has the capability to
create dedicated applications that rival programs written in stand
alone languages like C and Visual Basic. The strength’s of using
Excel are everybody already knows how to use it; Excel’s environment provides a set of tools that
allows sophisticated interfaces to be developed and rapidly tested; Excel has the unique capability to
communicate with multiple data sources and computer languages at once; and
a base line program can be rapidly upgraded in a short amount of
time. Most of all, since Excel and its
functionalities are pre-built; project development time and cost are substantially reduced. The JPL project
just mentioned went from conception to finished product in about 4 ½ months.
Interested in the Mars Rovers?
Opportunity, launched in 2003, is still going strong on the red planet. You can catch up with what it has been up to
here.
Overview: NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers,
launched toward Mars on June 10 and July 7, 2003, in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. They landed on Mars January 3 and
January 24 PST, 2004 (January 4 and January 25 UTC, 2004). The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a
long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet (Source:
NASA).
Curiosity, launched in 2011, is the
newest rover to land on the red planet and has been zooming around making some awesome
discoveries. You can read about it
here.
Overview: With its rover named Curiosity, Mars Science Laboratory mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. Curiosity was designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes. In other words, its mission is to determine the planet's "habitability."
(Source: NASA)
