Introspection-Based Fault Tolerance for Future On-Board Computing Systems

Introduction NASA's and JPL's future missions of deep space exploration face the challenge of designing, building, and operating progressively more capable autonomous spacecraft and planetary rovers. Given the latencies of spacecraft-Earth communication for such missions, the need for enhanced autonomy becomes obvious. Earthbased mission controllers will be unable to directly control distant spacecraft and robots to ensure timely precision and safety, and to support “opportunistic science” by capturing rapidly changing events, such as dust devils on Mars or volcanic eruptions on a remote moon in the solar system [OASIS.07]. Furthermore, the high data volume yielded by smart instruments on-board the spacecraft would overwhelm the limited bandwidth of spacecraft-Earth communication, enforcing on-board data analysis, filtering, and compression. Finally, on-board science processing, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) applications, may need more than 100 Gigaflops computational power.