Mars Attacks! Software Protection Against Space Radiation

Due to their low cost and the need to run computationally-intensive algorithms locally, satellites and spacecraft are increasingly employing off-the-shelf computing hardware. However, hardware in space is exposed to significantly higher amounts of radiation than on Earth, potentially destroying the hardware or causing it to output incorrect results. We envision that solely using software fault tolerance techniques, commodity hardware operating in space can achieve fault tolerance equivalent or close to expensive and slow radiation-hardened hardware. To achieve this goal, we need to address the two main radiation fault scenarios: hardware overheating and silent data corruption. We provide preliminary data on the effects of these errors, and introduce a set of techniques to address them. Enabling the full use of commodity hardware in space holds the promise of improving the compute capabilities and cost effectiveness of low-earth orbit satellites by orders of magnitude.