Engineering Ethics Problems in a Developing Country - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 235

5 Further Case Studies

5.1 Radio-Astronomy Centre Control and Data

Processing System

The radio-astronomy centre control and data processing system was the first project
led by Leading Designer 4. The system was intended for the radio-astronomy centre
to be developed in Poland. The basic system requirements were controlling the set
of dishes, receiving remote signals and processing them into a legible form. The
Automation Design Office employing Leading Designer 4 won the contest to design
and implement the system against two leading Polish institutes. Unfortunately, the
First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party cancelled the funding of the radio-
astronomy project in response to mismanagement of an optical astronomy project
which resulted in significant financial losses (Fig. 8.4 ).
Due to the embargoes mentioned in Sect. 8.2 , Leading Designer 4 had to use
home-made equipment, which had been obsolete for 5-10 years in the West. He
therefore designed and developed a computer system simulator (Lewoc 1971 ) (see
Fig. 8.5 ) of the type called several years later an event-driven simulator, in order to
verify that the performance of the systems designed using these components would
meet the system requirements.

SET OF
DISHES

…

CCDP
HARDWARE

SIGNAL
INPUTS

DELAY
CONTROLS

BASIC

PERIPHE-
RALS

ODRA 1204
C.P.U.

CCDP
SOFTWARE

CONTROL
PROGRAM

DELAY
DRIVER

SIGNAL
PROCESSOR

PRIORITY
LEVEL

NUMERICAL
PROGRAMS

EVENT-DRIVEN
CCDP SIMULATOR

Fig. 8.4 Radio-astronomy centre control and data processing system