Expecting the Unexpected - Radiation Hardened Software

Radiation induced Single Event Effects (SEEs) are a serious problem for spacecraft flight software, potentially leading to a complete loss of mission. Conventional risk mitigation has been focused on hardware, leading to slow, expensive and outdated on-board computing devices, increased power consumption and launch mass. Our approach is to look at SEEs from a software perspective, and to explicitly design flight software so that it can detect and correct the majority of SEEs. Radiation hardened flight software will reduce the significant residual risk for critical missions and flight phases, and enable more use of inexpensive and fast COTS hardware.