AeroAstro, Inc., a leading provider of small satellites and related technology products, today announced the award of a contract to continue development of a modular, Fault-Tolerant Electronics Supporting Space Exploration (FTESSE). This effort, funded through the NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, builds on the successful efforts of an earlier Phase I NASA award.
Under this contract, AeroAstro is designing mission-critical electronic communication systems at a much finer level of redundancy by building them with reusable circuit blocks made largely from reconfigurable field- programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and coupling the design with a framework utilizing intelligent reallocation of available resources to increase flexibility and reliability. Just as software relies on reusable objects to enhance productivity, AeroAstro is designing hardware that takes advantage of FPGAs and their on-the-fly programmability to enable systems to reconfigure themselves utilizing remaining available resources, enabling softer degradation and self-repair.
Dr. Bill Seng, AeroAstro’s CTO stated, “We are exceptionally pleased to be at the forefront of smart reconfigurable electronics technology, partnering with NASA to provide rugged electronic platforms with the capability not to just recover from a single fault, but to reconfigure themselves to literally work around multiple faults. This is critical technology for long duration missions to the moon and Mars, where repair facilities are few and far between. On the ground, there are applications in mission-critical systems such as those in medical, financial, and military usage.”
AeroAstro, Inc. is a leader in innovative micro and nanospace applications that open the space frontier to a larger and more varied customer base. These applications include science, remote sensing, and communications. AeroAstro manufactures low-cost satellite systems and components used in its own spacecraft and for spacecraft development in the U.S. and abroad.
