General Terms

• Main Authors: Chad Loseby, Peter Chapin, Carl Brandon
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Languages; Experimentation Keywords Ada; msp430; spark; student project; Arctic; Sea ice; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.153.6300; http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~pchapin/papers/SIGAda-2009-Experience-Report.pdf

We are constructing a remote sensing buoy that will be deployed on the Arctic sea ice north of Alaska. The buoy will gather environmental data and transmit that data back to home base via the Iridium satellite network. This data will then be used (by others) to refine models of ice movement. To enhance reliability the buoy software was written using SPARK Ada. SPARK was also helpful in reducing the memory footprint of the software to an acceptable level. Note also that the construction of the prototype buoy is a student project. Thus our experience is in an educational context.