Expecting the Unexpected: Radiation Hardened Software

Radiation induced Single Event Effects (SEEs) are a serious problem for spacecraft flight software, potentially leading to a complete loss of mission. Conventional risk mitigation has been focused on hardware, leading to slow, expensive and outdated on-board computing devices, increased power consumption and launch mass. Our approach is to look at SEEs from a software perspective, and to explicitly design flight software so that it can detect and correct the majority of SEES. Radiation hardened flight software will reduce the significant residual residual risk for critical missions and flight phases, and enable more use of inexpensive and fast COTS hardware

Separation kernel robustness testing : the xtratum case study

With time and space partitioned architectures becoming increasingly appealing to the European space sector, the dependability of separation kernel technology is a key factor to its applicability in European Space Agency projects. This paper explores the potential of the data type fault model, which injects faults through the Application Program Interface, in separation kernel robustness testing. This fault injection methodology has been tailored to investigate its relevance in uncovering vulnerabilities within separation kernels and potentially contributing towards fault removal campaigns within this domain. This is demonstrated through a robustness testing case study of the XtratuM separation kernel for SPARC LEON3 processors. The robustness campaign exposed a number of vulnerabilities in XtratuM, exhibiting the potential benefits of using such a methodology for the robustness assessment of separation kernels.peer-reviewe