Company Background:
Interactive Satellite Attitude-Data Correction Tool

This tool utilized an early version of the Space-Time Toolkit to allow interactive data corrections to the OTD (Optical Transient Detector) satellite's attitude data. The OTD was the first of several satellites designed by the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center to detect regional lightning strikes from orbit. Early in the OTD mission, errors in the OTD satellite's reported attitude were causing incorrect positioning of the resulting image and lightning data.

Since the Space-Time Toolkit performs geolocation of unprocessed data in real-time, it took only a few days to develop a tool that could provide an interactive means for directly adjusting the satellite's reported attitude to produce modified data files with the appropriate correction. This capability highlights the scientific importance of archiving minimally processed, "original" data products, as was done by the OTD team. The alternative is to attempt to correct processed data using techniques such as image warping, but this is notoriously difficult, time-consuming and far less accurate.