Engineers with Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., needed a computer for a NASA satellite. They found a solution with the SCS750 single-board computer (SBC) from Maxwell Technologies in San Diego.
The SBC will manage payload data for NASA’s Glory Earth-sciences mission.
Glory is a three-year mission to investigate the composition of greenhouse gases and the effect of solar radiation on the Earth’s environment. Its payloads will include an aerosol polarimetry sensor and cloud cameras to collect visible and infrared data, and a total irradiance monitor to measure solar radiation.
The SBC needed strong processing power to manage all the satellite’s data, and it needed strong shielding to withstand the effects of environmental radiation in space.
The SCS750 is based on a “triple modular redundancy” architecture in which three commercial IBM PowerPC 750 processors run the same program at all times and “vote” on each operation. If one of the processors suffers a radiation-induced upset and disagrees with the other two, the system is automatically resynchronised and resumes error-free operation.
Orbital is building the satellite bus and will manage both the 2008 launch and control the spacecraft for the duration of the mission. For more information, see www.maxwell.com.
