Evaluating Commercial Processors for Spaceflight with the Heterogeneous On-Orbit Processing Engine

A concept is presented to evaluate the potential for diverse collections of state-of-the-art commercial electronics, managed by a radiation-hardened supervisor, to operate reliably in a space radiation environment and to off-load the compute-intensive processing tasks from less-capable satellites when communication with ground stations is unsuitable or unavailable. The Heterogeneous On-Orbit Processing Engine (HOPE) is introduced as an on-orbit computing resource developed specifically for spaceflight testing and use with diverse collections of commercial processors such as multi-core central processing units, field-programmable gate arrays, and graphics-processing units, where each constituent architecture can be called upon to support the applications for which it is best suited. Additionally, the commercial electronics can be continuously monitored, controlled, and examined to determine the extent to which these terrestrial technologies can survive in the harsh radiation environment of space. These concepts and technologies will first be developed and analyzed in a “flat-sat” laboratory environment, then as a low Earth orbit spaceflight experiment (HOPESAT-1)supporting one or more networked satellites, and finally with follow-on missions featuring different electronics. Successful development of this computing resource and the resulting spaceflight data will enable future space system concepts to reliably perform on-orbit processing with state-of-the-art commercial technology.