Adaptable and Autonomic Management System for Dependable Aerospace Computing

1-As NASA and other agencies continue to undertake ever challenging remote sensing missions, the ability of satellites and space probes to diagnose and autonomously recover from faults will be paramount. In addition, a more pronounced use of radiation-susceptible components in order to reduce cost makes the challenge of ensuring system dependability even more difficult. To meet these and other needs, a processing platform for space is currently under development at Honeywell Inc. and the University of Florida for an upcoming NASA New Millennium Program mission. Among other features, the platform deploys an autonomic software management system to increase system dependability. In addition, a mission manager has been investigated and developed to provide an autonomous means to adapt to environmental conditions and system failures. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the management system philosophy with a focus on the adaptable mission manager. A variety of case studies are presented that highlight the dependability and performance improvement provided by the mission manager and autonomic health monitoring system deployed in realistic planetary orbits. NASA’s New Millennium Program (NMP) office has commissioned the development of an embedded cluster of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) processors for space missions [1]. The Dependable Multiprocessor (DM) technology provides numerous benefits, and the key benefit highlighted in this paper is the management system’s ability to detect and autonomously overcome the Single-Event Upset (SEU) radiation susceptibility of COTS components while minimizing the performance impact of the employed Software-Implemented Fault Tolerance or SIFT fault mitigation technique. Also, by deploying an autonomic information gathering infrastructure, the DM ensures the dependability and scalability of its middleware. In addition to being robust, the DM middleware and SIFT techniques are highly generalizable and can therefore be tailored to meet the needs of almost any mission. Using a SIFT-based mitigation technique on a commodity platform that is not customdeveloped for a single platform is a relatively novel way to address SEU mitigation of COTS components in space systems, and this research will help to analyze the efficacy of this approach. Keywords-Aerospace Computing, Autonomic Computing, COTS , Radiation Effects Mitigation, and Remote Sensing