Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER)

Cezzar, Ruknet; Sen, Ranjan K.

The Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER) project is essentially research oriented towards technology insertion issues for NASA's unmanned planetary probes. It was initiated to complement and augment the long-term efforts for space exploration with particular reference to NASA/LaRC's (NASA Langley Research Center) research needs for planetary exploration missions of the mid and late 1990s. The requirements for space missions as given in the somewhat dated Advanced Information Processing Systems (AIPS) requirements document are contrasted with the new requirements from JPL/Caltech involving sensor data capture and scene analysis. It is shown that more stringent requirements have arisen as a result of technological advancements. Two possible architectures, the AIPS Proof of Concept (POC) configuration and the MAX Fault-tolerant dataflow multiprocessor, were evaluated. The main observation was that the AIPS design is biased towards fault tolerance and may not be an ideal architecture for planetary and deep space probes due to high cost and complexity. The MAX concepts appears to be a promising candidate, except that more detailed information is required. The feasibility for adding neural computation capability to this architecture needs to be studied. Key impact issues for architectural design of computing systems meant for planetary missions were also identified.

Document ID

19890019104

Acquisition Source

Legacy CDMS

Document Type

Contractor Report (CR)

Authors

Date Acquired

September 6, 2013

Publication Date

June 25, 1989

Subject Category

Report/Patent Number

Accession Number

89N28475

Funding Number(s)

Distribution Limits

Public

Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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