Advanced avionics for low cost satellites

Working with the University of Surrey's Space Centre (SSC), Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) aim to define and breadboard a new generation of commercial off the shelf (COTS) avionics architecture for low cost satellites. This proposal is to investigate state-of-the-art developments in COTS data buses and determine if they have the relevant capabilities to be used in a robust, failure tolerant satellite architecture whilst also reducing costs through rapid software development tools. With innovation in fault tolerant buses and rapid software design, SSTL and SSC are also proposing to investigate methods to perform distributed processing across the avionics architecture with an aim to remove the need for large central processing units for multiple heterogeneous computing nodes and therefore reduce the time and cost of production of the satellite avionics.