Towards a Radiation-Tolerant Display System

Building towards a sustained lunar and deep-space presence requires advances in space infrastructure. Technologies commonly used on Earth, such as computer displays, cannot be naively incorporated into flight systems due to reliability concerns. Radiation-tolerant crew displays represent a critical technology gap NASA aims to address. To date, crew displays lag significantly behind state-of-the-art terrestrial systems. Constrained by environmental challenges, legacy hardware, and reliability requirements, current crew displays lack the ability to deliver high-resolution graphics, thus restricting visual communication capabilities and crew autonomy. Moreover, the varying requirements of a diverse collection of surface and orbital lunar assets further complicate finding a generalized solution and design. These limitations and challenges necessitate the development of enhanced avionic systems to support future crewed missions. In this paper, we present key design considerations, a methodology, and a preliminary architecture to realize a radiation-tolerant display system. Balancing radiation tolerance, compute capability, and scalability, this paper describes a methodology to optimize the performance and reliability of a display system. Leveraging a hybrid design of commercial-off-the-self (COTS) and radiation-hardened (rad-hard) processors and components, a preliminary architecture is presented that includes hardware and software mitigation strategies that consider both cumulative and acute radiation effects. Lastly, a prototype is presented for benchmarking and validation.