Pelican: Radiation-tolerant Computational Storage

Zephyr proposes to create Pelican, a radiation-tolerant computational storage device. This storage device provides high-capacity solid state storage through the use of 3D-NAND technology and a custom flash-controller implementation. Pelican is designed from the ground up to mitigate the adverse effects of radiation. In addition, Pelican will provide onboard compute resources attached to the flash memory to greatly accelerate IO intensive workloads by co-locating them with the storage. This allows for the generation of data products on the storage device itself, reducing processing time and effectively increasing the bandwidth between Pelican and a host device. The complete storage device will also simplify integration by using a modern specification from the Enterprise & Datacenter SSD Form Factor Working Group (ESDFF); E1.S. This specification uses the computation industry standard Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol over a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Interface. Storage capacity in the first version will be at least 2 TB of usable space. This is not raw capacity, but instead accounts for the redundancy and overprovisioning required to meet reliability requirements. Future versions of the product will increase the capacity to 6 TB and beyond.

science missions, particularly capturing rare or transient events image processing rendezvous and proximity operations terrain relative navigation sophisticated fault detection, isolation, and recovery

image processing for Earth observation constellations onboard processing for synthetic aperture RADAR and hyper-spectral imaging constellations sophisticated routing and edge computing for communication constellations rendezvous and proximity operations for satellite servicing missions

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