Resilient Afforable Cubesat Processor

Advanced Materials Applications, LLC (AMA) proposes the Resilient Affordable Computing Platform (RACP), a power-efficient high-performance space computer design for low-Earth orbit (LEO) missions. RACP?s hybrid design combines the state of the art ARM System on Chip (SoC) processors with a non-radiation-hard-by-design FPGA and a radiation tolerant microcontroller to deliver fault tolerance, data integrity, and scalable performance. RACP?s physical dimensions and low power consumption make it ideal for vehicles as small as CubeSats. RACP includes custom health monitoring software that continuously watches vulnerable components for potential latch-up or degradation due to radiation exposure and takes corrective action as needed. RACP will consume between 0.53 to 8.7 Watts of peak power depending on clock speed and workload. At the high end, its compute performance will exceed 25,000 Dhrystone Millions of Instructions Per Second (MIPS), 2,100 Whetstone Millions of Floating Point Operations Per Second (MFLOPS) and 9,200 Whetstone Millions of Fixed Point Operations Per Second (MOPS). RACP will support multiple sensor platforms with the primary application of data processing. The processors will use a Linux operating system, which means that mission software can be built and tested with standard open source software tools. Finally, components of RACP will be screened through radiation testing to ensure that the computer will operate reliably for a remote sensing low-Earth orbit (LEO) mission.

The Decadal Survey recommends that nine NASA missions be launched into LEO between 2015 and 2020. RACP's reliability and high compute performance per Watt can meet or exceed the data processing needs of instruments on these missions. Some examples of instruments that RACP can support include the multiangle polarimeter on the Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystems (ACE), the spectrometers on Global Atmospheric Composition Mission (GACM) and Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI). RACP can also support instruments in NASA?s LEO CubeSat programs since RACP will be designed to fit into a small fraction of the size, weight and power requirements of a 1U CubeSat form factor. RACP is an ideal architecture for computationally demanding tasks in a wide range of LEO missions.

RACP can meet or exceed the data processing needs of remote sensing instruments in which background radiation is present. This includes processing data on satellites and CubeSat missions in LEO. This also includes processing data on UAVs in which neutrons are present. Remote sensing instruments with high spatial, spectral, temporal or radiometric resolution will benefit from the reliability and high compute performance per Watt of RACP. RACP can benefit the DoD intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance applications. RACP can benefit the commercial?s industry?s Earth imagery services.

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