Intractable by conventional means, Altairis will solve this problem through application of a Finite State Model to ship motion sensor data. The dynamic characteristics of the ship's motion will be automatically characterized and used to determine the point in time and space that the ship will be in the optimal state for recovery of the aircraft.

Altair's President, Bryant Cruse, said: "For years Altair's extensive aviation background (four out of five of the company's senior management are former Naval Aviators, three of them test pilots) has influenced our approach to space operations. It is very gratifying that we can now apply technology developed for space to aircraft operations."

"More significantly, this application validates something that we have known for some time about our Altairis product. Although originally aimed at satellite and launch vehicle operations, our Finite State Modeling technology is completely generic and can automate the command and control of any instrumented system. We are currently looking at a number of new markets including computer network and Internet applications, as well as scaled versions of the product to support onboard automation and embedded control applications."

Altair provides advanced software products for command and control, product integration and space mission operations services. Altairis, the company's flagship product, has a modular, distributed, CORBA-compliant architecture incorporating Finite State Modeling, the only technology that can provide full automation for complex systems without additional development cost. Altair's FSM Architect product is a system engineering and design tool that helps operations personnel to perform systems analysis and to develop Finite State models without any computer programming.

Altair is a founding member and driving force behind the joint NASA/NRO/industry Space Object Technology Group standards project and was recently named Co-chair of the Space, Satellites and Ground Systems Working Group under the C4I Special Interest Group of the Object Management Group.

Altairis has been proven across the full range of mission life cycle phases from integration and test through real time operations to post-mission analysis. Application areas have ranged from satellites to launch vehicles to ground asset control. Altairis is the only control system product that has been designed to control a satellite constellation of homogeneous or heterogeneous spacecraft within a single application. Altairis has been selected for Landsat 7, MIDEX and other NASA programs as well as numerous other government and commercial customers.