The predominant failure mode in an ultra longlife system is the wear-out of components. In order to survive long duration missions, current fault tolerant design techniques would require excessive number of redundant components. This paper describes a more efficient fault tolerant avionics system architecture that requires much less redundant components. This architecture employs generic function blocks that can be programmed to replace a wide variety of components in-flight. Hence, each individual generic block is essentially equivalent to almost an entire redundant string of components in the conventional approach. In that way, the ultra long-life system can achieve much higher level of reliability while carrying much less components. On the other hand, due to the programmability of the generic redundant blocks, the physical location of a specific component might not be pre-determined. Therefore, wireless interconnection is employed to provide the necessary flexibility in connectivity. A testbed of this architecture is being developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Ultra-long-life spacecraft for long duration space exploration missions
53rd Interanational Astronautical Congress, The World Space Congress ; 2002 ; Houston, TX, United States
2002-10-10
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Keine Angabe
Englisch
Ultra Long-life Spacecraft for Long Duration Space Exploration Missions
Online Contents | 2003
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