SpaceWire: a spacecraft onboard network for real-time communications

SpaceWire is a real-time communications network for use onboard spacecraft. It has been designed to connect together sensors, mass-memories, processing units, and downlink telemetry sub-systems onboard a spacecraft into a lightweight, high-performance data-handling network. This paper provides an introduction to SpaceWire and the SpaceWire standard. It describes the key features of SpaceWire and gives an overview of several radiation tolerant chips that are being developed to support the use of SpaceWire. The many current and planned space missions that are using or plan to use SpaceWire for onboard data-handling are also introduced