Hardware shown to be possible alternative for in-flight navigation changes

An activity with the Technology Development Element (TDE) has developed a new system to reconfigure the on board computer of a mission to change the flight pattern depending on the mission needs.

The “Compact Reconfigurable Avionics” (CoRA) is a set of three activities demonstrating the flexibility, reliability and usefulness of a highly configurable system using model based avionics engineering. The activities are investigating the co-engineering between functional software engineering and data handling alongside GNC systems, to prototype a new avionics system that is compact and reconfigurable.

One of these activities in particular looked at the hardware needed – what kind of processor and reprogrammable FPGA could be used to make reconfigurable avionics possible.

Another activity selected the SpaceRider mission as an example of  a development that can benefit from in-flight reconfiguration. SpaceRider has two phases that require different processing on board. The first phase is related to the spacecraft orbiting the Earth for days, or months. The second concerns the moment of re-entry, whether the space craft moves through the atmosphere and lands. These two phases require the space craft to be able to perform two different types of processing on data provided by different types of sensors.

Without a reprogrammabe FPGA (a type of processor which can have its use defined after manufacture) capable of reconfiguring the processing during the flight this idea was only possible before using software. But now, these FPGAs are being developed it is possible in the future that hardware could also take on this change.

The benefit of using hardware for the reconfiguration is that it would make each mission extremely flexible in terms of its architecture. Engineers could decide whether or not to deploy a function on either software or hardware and this could be decided during development or even in flight, instead of earlier on in the design process.

Secondly, only one on board computer would need to be developed and could then be manufactured multiple times and just adapted to meet the needs of specific missions. Thirdly, once in space, the hardware can reconfigure a system to handle a failure – something software would not always be able to do so easily.

Using the Brave-Medium FPGA [LINK] the activity developed the full tool chain, inputting models developed by other studies to automatically generate the code needed to embed it in the flight software environment including both software and hardware deployment, generating everything necessary to execute the  system.

The Brave-Medium was found to be too small for the activity’s objectives, and couldn’t contain enough functions, as such  next the activity plans to assess whether using the Brave-Large will meet the needs of the system.

T702-502SW closed in August 2020.