APPLICATION OF ADAPTIVE COMPUTING IN SATELLITE TELEMETRY PROCESSING

Abstract

The advent of adaptive computers built from re-programmable logic devices presents a potential solution for meeting the data processing requirements of the new era of Earth monitoring satellites to be launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth Science Enterprise project. The Earth Observing System (EOS) AM-1 spacecraft, the first satellite of this new era, will produce in only six months as much data as NASA has collected to this date. As a consequence, the Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) project is building high performance and highly costly parallel processing systems to address the real-time data production requirements. Together with the high performance front-end ingest and level 0 processing microcircuits developed in-house at the Goddard Space Flight Center’s (GSFC) Data Systems Technology Division (DSTD), adaptive computers present a possible alternative to traditional CPU-based systems to increase the performance while reducing the cost of satellite telemetry processing systems. The Adaptive Scientific Data Processing (ASDP) project has been investigating the use of adaptive computers in the implementation of space borne scientific data processing systems. An order of magnitude processing speed acceleration over high-end workstations has been demonstrated for both level 1 and level 3 algorithms. This paper discusses the use of adaptive computing in satellite telemetry processing systems, level 1 and beyond. Primarily, it describes the efforts and presents the results of two prototypes developed by the ASDP project. The limitations of the current state of the technology are discussed and the expected improvements to facilitate the adoption of adaptive computers are presented. Finally, future work of the ASDP project is discussed.