Core Flight Executive Software Radiation Mitigation Study
Project Description
The reliability of SmallSat / CubeSat missions may be increased by using software radiation mitigation for single event upsets (SEUs). Implementing protection in software results in a lower level of tolerance than traditional hardware techniques, but hardware costs and power requirements are kept to a minimum by taking advantage of nonredundant commodity hardware. This work will extend NASA’s Core Flight Executive (cFE) to provide software based protection and evaluate the results so that informed decisions can be made about such trade-offs.
The project objectives are to answer the following questions about software radiation mitigation techniques applied to NASA’s Core Flight Executive (cFE):
· How much can the occurrence of failures due to SEUs be reduced?
· What were the costs in terms of processor overhead?
· What are the impacts on normal cFE application development?
To answer these questions, this project will incorporate software radiation mitigation into cFE for an example CubeSat application. The primary protection mechanism investigated will be scalable modular redundancy of software components (applications). Scalable modular redundancy will be non-intrusive for cFE application developers and allow the level of redundancy to be adjusted as needed. Other techniques, such as source level approaches, may be employed for cFE itself if testing reveals potential reliability gains.
Anticipated Benefits
CubeSats will be able to increase flight software reliability by a quantifiable amount (with respect to SEUs) without increasing hardware costs or power requirements. Onboard science data processing will be made more reliable by detecting and recovering from silent data corruption, allowing more onboard processing which will reduce data downlink requirements. The scalable nature of the approach would enable missions that travel through multiple radiation environments to trade performance for reliability depending on the current environment.
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Primary U.S. Work Locations and Key Partners
| Organizations Performing Work | Role | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
Goddard Space Flight Center
(GSFC)
|
Lead Organization | NASA Center | Greenbelt, Maryland |
Primary U.S. Work Locations
-
Maryland
