A method to develop mission critical data processing systems for satellite based instruments. The spinning mode case

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for developing mission-critical data processing systems for satellite instruments, focusing on spinning mode operations, emphasizing responsiveness, fault tolerance, and certification challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach tailored for real-time, resource-constrained satellite data processing systems, demonstrated through a real-life X-Ray detector example.

Findings

Effective data processing in spinning mode satellite operations

Enhanced fault tolerance and responsiveness in mission-critical systems

Successful certification of complex hardware-software systems

Abstract

Modern satellite based experiments are often very complex real-time systems, composed by flight and ground segments, that have challenging resource related constraints, in terms of size, weight, power, requirements for real-time response, fault tolerance, and specialized input/output hardware-software, and they must be certified to high levels of assurance. Hardware-software data processing systems have to be responsive to system degradation and to changes in the data acquisition modes, and actions have to be taken to change the organization of the mission operations. A big research & develop effort in a team composed by scientists and technologists can lead to produce software systems able to optimize the hardware to reach very high levels of performance or to pull degraded hardware to maintain satisfactory features. We'll show real-life examples describing a system, processing the data of a X-Ray detector on satellite-based mission in spinning mode.