SpaceCloud Cloud Computing and In-Orbit Demonstration

Processing requirements are exponentially increasing to keep pace with the data volumes generated by increasingly “Big Data” sensors. These requirements are compounded when factoring in the data movements planned for future spacecraft constellation mesh networks, i.e. connected spacecraft infrastructures for on-orbit fleet management, autonomous sensor fusion, data storage, very low latency actionable information generation, and real-time communication.
Unibap AB and Troxel Aerospace Industries, Inc. have worked together to develop a heterogeneous radiation-tolerant onboard cloud computing hardware platform bringing terrestrial Internet-of-Things edge processing to space, e.g. Infrastructure as a Service, Big Data analytics and Artificial Intelligence. This platform is part of Unibap’s SpaceCloud ecosystem, which makes virtual servers and other resources dynamically available to customers. Leveraging its powerful heterogeneous hardware platform, the SpaceCloud framework has been developed with support by the European Space Agency (ESA) to enable rapid and flexible application development using containerized and isolated virtualization either for execution locally or on networked spacecraft. SpaceCloud allows exchange of information that is transparent between local or networked nodes to facilitate cooperation using a distributed mesh network communication architecture.
A node is any entity or subfunction, such as an application, or a vehicle, ground control station, sensor read-out module, cloud detection application, data base indexing etc., that is connected to the mesh network. Data exchanges may include intra-data processing between different software apps in a pipeline, or telemetry from on-orbit robotics-based nodes, commands from ground control nodes, science data fusion, etc. By exchanging pertinent data, nodes can act together to perform a task autonomously without requiring direct control or intervention by a central control node.

The focus of SpaceCloud is to enable commercial software to be reused onboard to decrease the overall cost and development time to deploy new capabilities on compatible space assets. As an example, SaraniaSat and Unibap have worked with L3Harris Geospatial to enable the geospatial intelligence software suite ENVI®/IDL® on SpaceCloud. A very low-latency onboard SpaceCloud application for detecting aircraft using ENVI®/IDL® and machine learning within 100 sq. km multispectral satellite imagery has been successfully developed and demonstrated.

The SpaceCloud framework executes on the iX5 and iX10 families of x86 radiation tolerant computer solutions featuring AMD multi-core CPU, GPU, Microsemi FPGA, and Intel Movidius Myriad X VPU accelerator and local high-speed solid-state storage. Radiation testing in the US has shown very promising results on both 28 nm and 14 nm processor nodes with high tolerance for single event latch-up (SEL) and total ionizing dose (TID).

To improve radiation tolerance, the SpaceCloud framework performs real-time software monitoring and FDIR through the SafetyChip feature working in tandem on the x86 software stack and an RTOS in a fault-tolerant configuration in FPGA. The concept has been developed with funding support from ESA. Radiation tolerance can be further increased by use of a single event upset (SEU) mitigating middleware that protects CPU and GPU processing.

This paper presents the SpaceCloud In-orbit Demonstration compute architecture and framework configuration as implemented in D-Orbit’s Wild Ride ION SCV mission due for launch in Q2 2021.