Avionics systems technology, development, and applications

NASA's New Millennium Program (NMP) is adopting the faster-better-cheaper philosophy to enable NASA to maintain low cost, high and evolving technology satellites. Industry has responded by designing, developing, and manufacturing a single-chip, radiation hardened flight computer processor and as well as a single-chip, radiation hardened MIL-STD-1553B/1773 Remote Terminal (RT). NASA's NMP Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and the Earth Orbiter-1 (EO-1) are the first satellites to be utilizing the rad-hard integrated spacecraft bus co-developed with industry. The rad-hard spacecraft bus incorporates: the rad-hard 12 MHz 32 bit single board Mongoose 5 flight computer with attached 1.4 Gbit solid state recorder. The integrated spacecraft bus utilizes surface mount technology (SMT) and chip-on-board technology for all of the printed circuit (PC) boards enabling higher chip density to board dimension creating smaller, lighter, and cheaper PC boards and chassis. This technology is taking advantage of the higher density memory chips fast becoming available. EO-1 will fly a solid state recorder (SSR) with just over 40 Gbits of memory, 20 Gbits per board and evolving to SSRs with 512 Gbits per board expandable in 512 Gbit increments.