Massively Extended Modular Monitoring and a Second Life for Upper Stages

Launching science and technology experiments to space is expensive. Although commercial spaceflight has resulted in a drop of prices, the cost for a launch is still significant. However, most of the weight that is needed to conduct experiments in space belongs to the spacecraft’s bus and it is responsible for power distribution, thermal management, orbital control and communications. An upper stage, on the other hand, includes all the necessary subsystems and has to be launched in any case. Many upper stages (e.g. ARIANE5) will even stay in orbit for several years after their nominal mission with all their subsystems intact but passivated. We propose a compact system based on a protective container and high-performance Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware that allows cost-efficient launching of technology experiments by reusing the launcher’s upper stage and its subsystems. Adding acquisition channels for various sensors gives the launch provider the ability to exploit the computational power of the COTS hardware during the nominal mission. In contrast to existing systems, intelligent and mission-dependent data selection and compression can be applied to the sensor data. In this paper, we demonstrate the implementation and qualification of a payload bus system based on COTS components that is minimally invasive to the launcher (ARIANE5) and its nominal mission while offering computational power to both the launch provider and a potential payload user. The reliability of the COTS-based system is improved by radiation hardening techniques and software-based self-test detecting and counteracting faults during the mission.