NASA National Scientific Balloon Facility Successfully Integrates BiTMICRO's Solid-State Disk Storage Technology.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

PALESTINE, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 19, 2001

E-Disk Flash Drive Exceeds Maximum Test Criteria in New

NSBF Systems Flying High Above 120,000 Feet Altitude

National Scientific Balloon Facility (NSBF), a NASA facility that provides the services of launching high altitude research balloons, tracking, and recovering the scientific experiments suspended beneath them, for universities and NASA centers from all over the world, successfully incorporated BiTMICRO Networks' flash drive solid-state disk (SSD) solutions for use in NSBF research, engineering, and operational support.

The NSBF Palestine Facility provides complete balloon operations services and engineering support to the United States and foreign scientific communities. The services provided include inflation, launching of the balloon, tracking and recovery of the payload, and telecommand and data retrieval with reliable electronics systems.

Some of the NSBF areas of engineering support are the design of balloon systems, research in balloon materials, electronics design, gondola design and thermal analysis. Also included are power system design, instrumentation design and integration, and recovery system design.

"We have an extremely experienced team. It's a great advantage to have such a team that designs and develops the balloon systems, but also knows how to identify and use new technology to our advantage. When we required a more reliable storage solution for long duration balloon flights, BiTMICRO's E-Disk was our choice," said Bryan Stilwell, NSBF Long Duration Balloon Group Supervisor.

"All of the ideas, designs, plans, approaches, and hard work, which were embodied in our balloon systems and the flight operations, were proven to be sound and real 'winners.' Every design aspect of our systems with BiTMICRO's E-Disks functioned successfully as planned," commented Danny Ball, NSBF site manager.

"The maximum and comprehensive success criteria for our balloon flights with E-Disks were met and exceeded, including our requirement for 120,000 feet systems operating altitude. These flight tests are steps that will usher us in new exciting times for scientific ballooning," added Ball.

In over 25 years of operation, the NSBF has launched more than 1,700 balloons for 35 universities, 23 other research agencies, and 33 foreign groups. During this span of years, there has been a dramatic increase in sophistication of experiments and demands for services.

Some types of research for which balloons are used are Cosmic Ray studies, Gamma Ray and X-Ray Astronomy, Optical and Ultra-Violet Astronomy, Infrared Astronomy, Atmospheric Sciences, Magnetospherics, and Micrometeorite Particles.

In addition to the Palestine operation, the NSBF conducts scientific ballooning operations from various remote sites in the U.S. and several foreign countries. The Facility is recognized on the international level as being one of the most advanced organizations of its type in the world.

"This resounding and unmitigated success of incorporating our E-Disks to NSBF's new balloon flight systems was the direct result of the teamwork among the best-of-breed dedicated NSBF staff and BiTMICRO engineers. We understand NSBF's data storage requirements. We responded with storage solutions that meet their needs," said Rudy Bruce, BiTMICRO president.

BiTMICRO's first generation E-Disk flashdrive SSD based on patented FlashBus technology offers unprecedented sustained random read and write transfer rates of up to 68 megabytes a second and random access times of less than 48 microseconds. The E-Disk's flash drive storage capacity ranges between 128 megabytes and 77 gigabytes.

Each E-Disk flashdisk solid state drive device is configured to have the same form, fit and function as hard disk drives (HDD), but without the need for large power heat dissipation, noise protection and environmental hardening. They are offered with SCSI, IDE or Fibre Channel interface in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDD form factors.

The E-Disks, utilizing BiTMICRO's FlashBus technology, are fully compatible with Linux, Solaris, Windows, MacOS and LynxOS using standard drivers. They also support AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, NetBSD, OS/2, QNX, VxWorks, SCO Unixware and OpenServer, Solaris x86 and Tru64.

For more information about NSBF commercial ballooning, including the High-Altitude Ballooning Initiative and Suborbital Programs, visit http://master.nsbf.nasa.gov.

For BiTMICRO Networks E-Disk technology information, call 510-74E-DISK / 510-743-3475 or visit http://www.bitmicro.com.

About NASA National Scientific Balloon Facility

The National Scientific Balloon Facility (http://master.nsbf.nasa.gov) was established in Boulder, Colorado in 1961 under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. In October 1987, the NASA contract to operate the NSBF was awarded to the Physical Science Laboratory under the auspices of New Mexico State University located in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The contract is administered by Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC) Wallops Flight Facility. The NSBF has the following three-fold mission: 1) Plan and develop facilities and provide operations service to meet the approved ballooning requirements of the scientific community. 2) Perform the necessary research and development to meet future scientific ballooning requirements. 3) Provide consulting services in the field of scientific ballooning.

About BiTMICRO Networks

BiTMICRO Networks, Inc. (http://www.bitmicro.com), a privately held California corporation, is the world's premier supplier of high performance solid state disk, flash disk drive, and storage systems and management solutions. BiTMICRO's storage solutions offer unmatched performance, data availability, and manageability across a spectrum of platforms from entry systems to super computers. BiTMICRO product lines are ideal for military, aerospace, telecommunications, transportation, e-commerce, embedded systems, expanding Internet communications and enterprise installations such as servers, JBOD, network attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN) and RAID.

Note to Editors: E-Disk(TM), FlashBus(TM), BiTMICRO(TM) and BiTMICRO Networks(TM) are trademarks of BiTMICRO Networks, Inc. Others are trademarks of their respective companies or other countries.