Adaptive Computing for Spacecraft Garrett D. Chandler, Darren J. Brown, Timothy W. Arrowsmith, Shadab G. Ambat, N. Siva Jeganathan, Subash M. Sridhar, Osamah A. Rawashdeh, James E. Lumpp ABSTRACT EAFTC HARDWARE The desire for increasingly ambitious space systems has prompted NASA and the Department of Defense to move toward providing “Responsive Space” capabilities. As such, there exists a need to place orders of magnitude more computing power into orbit than is possible using the existing space computing system paradigms. The challenge is to provide this increased computing capability while maintaining or improving the fault-tolerance of the systems. In particular, non-radiation hardened commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components will suffer from multiple single event upsets (SEUs) throughout their service life. These SEUs occur when the charged particles that exist outside the terrestrial atmosphere enter micro-electronic devices (e.g., CPUs, Memories, Programmable Logic) and charge or discharge individual transistors in the device. Typically, the performance of radiation hardened, space qualified processors lags between one and three years behind off-the-shelf hardware. The Intelligent Dependable Embedded Architectures (IDEA) Lab at the University of Kentucky in collaboration with Honeywell Defense and Space Electronic Systems Group and the New Millennium Project at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing fault-tolerant high-performance computing technologies for spacecraft. Space Technology 8, part of the New Millennium Program at NASA, is scheduled to launch in 2008 and will include the experimental computer system being developed. EAFTC COMPUTING MODEL ARDEA TEST HARDWARE ENVIRONMENTALY ADAPTIVE FAULT TOLERANT COMPUTING (EAFTC) ARCHITECTURE ARDEA RECONFIGURATION MODEL PUBLICATIONS O. Rawashdeh and James E. Lumpp, Jr. “Ardea: A Dynamic Reconfiguration Framework for Fault-Tolerant Distributed Embedded Systems” Journal of Systems and Software, Special Issue – Architecting Dependable Systems. submitted October 2005. O. Rawashdeh. “Ardea: A Reconfigurable Architecture for Fault Tolerant Distributed Embedded Systems.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. University of Kentucky. Lexington, KY. December 2005. O. Rawashdeh and J. Lumpp, Jr. “Run-Time Behavior of Ardea: A Dynamically Reconfiguring Distributed Embedded Control Architecture,” IEEE Aerospace Conference, IEEEAC paper # 1516, March 2006. O. Rawashdeh, D. Feinauer, C. Harr, G. Chandler, D. Jackson, A. Groves, and J. Lumpp. “A Dynamically Reconfiguring Avionics Architecture for UAVs” AIAA-2005-7050. AIAA Infotech@Aerospace Conference. Arlington, Virginia. September 2005. G. Chandler, C. Harr, O. Rawashdeh, D. Feinauer, D. Jackson, A. Groves, and J. Lumpp. “Wireless Extension of an Avionics Bus for Prototyping and Testing Reconfigurable UAVs” AIAA-2005-7151. AIAA Infotech@Aerospace Conference. Arlington, Virginia. September 2005. AUTOMATICALLY RECONFIGURABLE DISTRIBUTED EMBEDDED ARCHITECUTRE (ARDEA) ARDEA RECONFIGURATION SPECIFICATIONS FUNDING ACKNOWLEDGEMENT NASA Kentucky Space Grant Consortium (WKU 516171-06-23) NASA EPSCoR (WKU 596236-06-10)