Design Solutions For Modular Satellite Architectures

The cost-effective access to space envisaged by ESA would open a wide range of new opportunities and markets, but is still many years ahead. There is still a lack of devices, circuits, systems which make possible to develop satellites, ground stations and related services at costs compatible with the budget of academic institutions and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). As soon as the development time and cost of small satellites will fall below a certain threshold (e.g. 100,000 to 500,000 €), appropriate business models will likely develop to ensure a cost-effective and pervasive access to space, and related infrastructures and services. These considerations spurred the activity described in this paper, which is aimed at: - proving the feasibility of low-cost satellites using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) devices. This is a new trend in the space industry, which is not yet fully exploited due to the belief that COTS devices are not reliable enough for this kind of applications; - developing a flight model of a flexible and reliable nano-satellite with less than 25,000€; - training students in the field of avionics space systems: the design here described is developed by a team including undergraduate students working towards their graduation work. The educational aspects include the development of specific new university courses; - developing expertise in the field of low-cost avionic systems, both internally (university staff) and externally (graduated students will bring their expertise in their future work activity); - gather and cluster expertise and resources available inside the university around a common high-tech project; - creating a working group composed of both University and SMEs devoted to the application of commercially available technology to space environment. The first step in this direction was the development of a small low cost nano-satellite, started in the year 2004: the name of this project was PiCPoT (Piccolo Cubo del Politecnico di Torino, Small Cube of Politecnico di Torino). The project was carried out by some departments of the Politecnico, in particular Electronics and Aerospace. The main goal of the project was to evaluate the feasibility of using COTS components in a space project in order to greatly reduce costs; the design exploited internal subsystems modularity to allow reuse and further cost reduction for future missions. Starting from the PiCPoT experience, in 2006 we began a new project called ARaMiS (Speretta et al., 2007) which is the Italian acronym for Modular Architecture for Satellites. This work describes how the architecture of the ARaMiS satellite has been obtained from the lesson learned from our former experience. Moreover we describe satellite operations, giving some details of the major subsystems. This work is composed of two parts. The first one describes the design methodology, solutions and techniques that we used to develop the PiCPoT satellite; it gives an overview of its operations, with some details of the major subsystems. Details on the specifications can also be found in (Del Corso et al., 2007; Passerone et al, 2008). The second part, indeed exploits the experience achieved during the PiCPoT development and describes a proposal for a low-cost modular architecture for satellite

Developing and Deploying Security Applications for In-Vehicle Networks

Radiological material transportation is primarily facilitated by heavy-duty on-road vehicles. Modern vehicles have dozens of electronic control units or ECUs, which are small, embedded computers that communicate with sensors and each other for vehicle functionality. ECUs use a standardized network architecture--Controller Area Network or CAN--which presents grave security concerns that have been exploited by researchers and hackers alike. For instance, ECUs can be impersonated by adversaries who have infiltrated an automotive CAN and disable or invoke unintended vehicle functions such as brakes, acceleration, or safety mechanisms. Further, the quality of security approaches varies wildly between manufacturers. Thus, research and development of after-market security solutions have grown remarkably in recent years. Many researchers are exploring deployable intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms using machine learning and data science techniques. However, there is a gap between developing security system algorithms and deploying prototype security appliances in-vehicle. In this paper, we, a research team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory working in this space, highlight challenges in the development pipeline, and provide techniques to standardize methodology and overcome technological hurdles.Comment: 10 pages, PATRAM 2

Low-Cost UAV Swarm for Real-Time Object Detection Applications

With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, becoming readily available and affordable, applications for these devices have grown immensely. One type of application is the use of drones to fly over large areas and detect desired entities. For example, a swarm of drones could detect marine creatures near the surface of the ocean and provide users the location and type of animal found. However, even with the reduction in cost of drone technology, such applications result costly due to the use of custom hardware with built-in advanced capabilities. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is to compile an easily customizable, low-cost drone design with the necessary hardware for autonomous behavior, swarm coordination, and on-board object detection capabilities. Additionally, this thesis outlines the necessary network architecture to handle the interconnection and bandwidth requirements of the drone swarm. The drone on-board system uses a PixHawk 4 flight controller to handle flight mechanics, a Raspberry Pi 4 as a companion computer for general-purpose computing power, and a NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit to perform object detection in real-time. The implemented network follows the 802.11s standard for multi-hop communications with the HWMP routing protocol. This topology allows drones to forward packets through the network, significantly extending the flight range of the swarm. Our experiments show that the selected hardware and implemented network can provide direct point-to-point communications at a range of up to 1000 feet, with extended range possible through message forwarding. The network also provides sufficient bandwidth for bandwidth intensive data such as live video streams. With an expected flight time of about 17 minutes, the proposed design offers a low-cost drone swarm solution for mid-range aerial surveillance applications

Multistage Switching Architectures for Software Routers

Software routers based on personal computer (PC) architectures are becoming an important alternative to proprietary and expensive network devices. However, software routers suffer from many limitations of the PC architecture, including, among others, limited bus and central processing unit (CPU) bandwidth, high memory access latency, limited scalability in terms of number of network interface cards, and lack of resilience mechanisms. Multistage PC-based architectures can be an interesting alternative since they permit us to i) increase the performance of single software routers, ii) scale router size, iii) distribute packet manipulation and control functionality, iv) recover from single-component failures, and v) incrementally upgrade router performance. We propose a specific multistage architecture, exploiting PC-based routers as switching elements, to build a high-speed, largesize,scalable, and reliable software router. A small-scale prototype of the multistage router is currently up and running in our labs, and performance evaluation is under wa

Security analysis and exploitation of arduino devices in the internet of things

The pervasive presence of interconnected objects enables new communication paradigms where devices can easily reach each other while interacting within their environment. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) represents the integration of several computing and communications systems aiming at facilitating the interaction between these devices. Arduino is one of the most popular platforms used to prototype new IoT devices due to its open, flexible and easy-to-use architecture. Ardunio Yun is a dual board microcontroller that supports a Linux distribution and it is currently one of the most versatile and powerful Arduino systems. This feature positions Arduino Yun as a popular platform for developers, but it also introduces unique infection vectors from the security viewpoint. In this work, we present a security analysis of Arduino Yun. We show that Arduino Yun is vulnerable to a number of attacks and we implement a proof of concept capable of exploiting some of them

2011 Exhibitors

Listings and Descriptions of 2011 Small Satellite Conference Exhibitor

Method and system for environmentally adaptive fault tolerant computing

A method and system for adapting fault tolerant computing. The method includes the steps of measuring an environmental condition representative of an environment. An on-board processing system's sensitivity to the measured environmental condition is measured. It is determined whether to reconfigure a fault tolerance of the on-board processing system based in part on the measured environmental condition. The fault tolerance of the on-board processing system may be reconfigured based in part on the measured environmental condition

A remotely accessible USB hub:software design and testing

Abstract. Remote use of USB peripherals has been identified as useful for Aava Mobile customers. Therefore, the commercial feasibility of an accessory that allows accessing USB devices remotely was studied at Aava, and a prototype device was built. The software in this accessory was required to transfer data securely, be automatically detectable on a local network, and operate autonomously. It is explored in this thesis how remote USB sharing and the requirements could be implemented using open-source software components. New USB remote use programs that support the required capabilities were created as part of this thesis. These applications run on Linux-based operating systems and make use of the existing open-source USB/IP tool protocol. The new client program uses the existing Linux USB/IP virtual host controller driver, and the server is implemented in user space. After the software work was concluded, measurements were performed for evaluation purposes. Optimal encryption ciphers for the prototype hardware were also selected. It was verified by testing that network delay causes major performance degradation. Other significant performance concerns were network adapter speed, the use of encryption, USB port speed, and the user space server implementation. However, while these aspects reduced the performance of the prototype, they were not determined to be critical. The accessory was not intended for high-performance use cases, and therefore the use of cost-effective components can be justified

Telecommand and Telemetry Implementation of Aalto-2 CubeSat Project

This thesis work concentrates on the development of telecommand and telemetry handler software for a 2 kg Aalto-2 nanosatellite, currently scheduled for launch in October 2016. The satellite is part of the international QB50 termosphere mission and it is developed by Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. The telecommand and telemetry (TC/TM) handler, in charge of communications, is one of the most important systems of satellite software, which is executed by On Board Computer (OBC). In this thesis, the TC/TM handler subsystem is designed, giving it a special attention in maintaining simplicity and reliability. The design process is started with the derivation of requirements and constraints. The software is implemented for FreeRTOS, an open-source real-time operating system, which is selected as operation environment of the satellite OBC software. The designed software uses a Concatenative Language approach and complies with ECSS-PUS standard. It features different libraries that provide capabilities for on-board data handling needs, the most notable of which is the Dyncall library. The library provides functions of dynamic function call in C. The UHF driver handles incoming and outgoing low-level communications protocols, and the Coffee File System implements storage management. The work gives an overview of small satellite communication architectures and relevant standards and interfaces.Esta tésis se centra en el desarrollo de sistemas de telecontrol y software controlador de telemetría para el nanosatélite Aalto-2, cuyo lanzamiento está previsto para octubre de 2016. El satélite forma parte de la misión internacional QB50 termosphere y ha sido desarrollado por la Universidad de Aalto en Espoo, Finlandia. El controlador de telecomando y telemetría (TC/TM), a cargo de las comunicaciones, es uno de los sistemas más importantes del software del satélite. Este software es ejecutado por el Ordenador de abordo (OBC). El proceso de diseño se inicia con la derivación de los requisitos y limitaciones. El software está implementado para FreeRTOS, un sistema operativo en tiempo real de código abierto, que es seleccionado como entorno operativo del software del OBC. El software diseñado utiliza un enfoque de programación concatenativa y cumple con la norma de ECSS-PUS. Cuenta con diferentes librerias que proporcionan capacidades de datos de abordo necesidades de manipulación, el más notable de los cuales es la libreria Dyncall. Esta proporciona funciones de llamada dinámica en C. Los drivers de la UHF maneja los protocolos de comunicación de bajo nivel de entrada y salida, y el sistema de archivo es implementado por el Coffe File System o CFS. El trabajo ofrece una visión general de las arquitecturas de comunicaciones de nanosatélites, las normas pertinentes y las interfaces.Aquesta tési es centra en el desenvolupament de sistemes de telecontrol i programari controlador de telemetria per al nanosatèl·lit Aalto-2, el llançament del qual està previst per octubre del 2016. El satèl·lit forma part de la missió internacional QB50 termosphere i ha estat desenvolupat per la Universitat d'Aalto a Espoo, Finlàndia. El controlador de telecomandament i telemetria (TC / TM), se'n fa càrrec de les comunicacions i és un dels sistemes més importants del programari del satèl·lit. Aquest és executat per l'ordinador d'abord (OBC). El procés de disseny s'inicia amb la derivació dels requisits i limitacions. El programari està implementat per FreeRTOS, un sistema operatiu en temps real de codi obert, que és seleccionat com a entorn operatiu del OBC. El programari dissenyat utilitza un enfocament de programació concatenada i compleix amb la norma de ECSS-PUS. Compta amb diferents llibreries que proporcionen capacitats de dades d'abordo necessitats de manipulació, el més notable dels quals és la llibreria Dyncall. Aquesta proporciona funcions de crida dinàmica en C. Els drivers de la UHF controla els protocols de comunicació a baix nivell d'entrada i sortida, i el sistema d'arxiu és implementat pel Coffe File System o CFS. El treball ofereix una visió general de les arquitectures de comunicacions de nanosatèl·lits, les normes pertinents i les interfícies