Protection Scheme for Star Tracker Images

Radiation effects in star trackers can cause malfunctions that may lead to the loss of communication with the satellite. This paper presents a scheme to protect star tracker images stored in memory against single event upsets (SEUs). Fault injection and resource utilization reports show that, with the protection technique, 99.98% of the SEUs can be corrected using 37% less memory space than single error correction Hamming codes. The remaining 0.02% has a negligible effect in the star identification algorithm.