Onboard Processing using the Adaptive Network Architecture
Dipa Suri, Adam S. Howell, Nishanth Shankaran, John S. Kinnebrew, William R. Otte, Doug Schmidt, Gautam Biswas · 2006
Contract NNA04AA69C. Abstract — Many future earth and space science missions will be composed of multiple spacecraft requiring autonomous ca-pabilities for both opportunistic and coordinated science observations. The Adaptive Network Architecture (ANA) is a software framework composed of multiple, heterogeneous software agents designed for real-time operation of constellations or formations of spacecraft. The ANA is built upon mature terrestrial standards and best practices for software development, including CORBA Component middleware designed for distributed real-time embedded systems. In this paper we present the further development of the ANA’s Science Agent to include a hierarchical computational architecture for reconfigurable onboard science processing. The architecture allows for runtime reconfiguration and/or re-deployment of software components across a set of processors based on the available computational resources and changes in operating mode. Application of the science data processing framework to the upcoming Magnetospheric Multi-Scale (MMS) mission is also discussed. I.