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Active TRL 2 (started at 2, targeting 4)
The student-developed Software-Defined Payload Interface (SDPI) leverages prior flight engineering experience from the University of California, Los Angeles’ Electron Losses and Fields Investigation (ELFIN) satellite mission to provide a universal interface solution. The SDPI is powered by a flight-proven system-on-chip field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which offers high flexibility and customization. The technology provides a modular data and power interface for straightforward integration into a wide range of flight vehicles. Most common protocols are supported directly in hardware and customized via software, while more niche protocols can be implemented in FPGA fabric. Derived from technologies previously flown on CubeSats, the SDPI is small, low cost, power efficient, and nonintrusive. A graphical user interface assists in troubleshooting common interface issues.
Problem Statement
One of the many complex aspects of spaceflight is the design of interfaces for payloads that fly aboard host vehicles. Space missions often utilize a wide variety of data and power standards, making it rare for a spacecraft bus and an experiment to communicate without significant engineering effort and advanced planning. This process of ensuring a payload can interface appropriately with the flight vehicle is often complex and time consuming, as it typically requires a custom design. These custom interface solutions can introduce data quality issues, incur substantial engineering costs, and are typically not reusable for future missions. It is often important to get payloads to flight test as quickly as possible, but the lack of standardization and interoperability makes this challenging.
Technology Maturation
Flight tests aim to validate the SDPI technology and its ability to quickly transition payloads from the bench to integration to support flight tests on multiple vehicles. Additionally, the research team plans to use the SDPI as the interface for other UCLA-built instruments (e.g., highly sensitive magnetic field instruments and particle detectors for monitoring and studying space weather). Further evolutions of SDPI will likely involve multi-payload support (e.g., using a single SDPI to connect multiple payloads to a flight vehicle) and real-time data compression, since data bandwidth is often a limiting factor, especially for small satellites like CubeSats.
- Adaptable: Customizable data and power interfaces for integration into diverse vehicles - Flexible: Common and niche (via FPGA fabric) hardware protocols and over-the-air updates - Efficient: Small, low-cost, power-efficient, and nonintrusive
Future Customers
- Potential use by NASA for quickly transitioning payloads from the bench to integration with multiple vehicles for flight tests
- Commercial flight provider payload integration
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