StereoBit: Onboard Science Data Processing for Stereo Winds

For future Earth decadal survey missions, the NASA Earth Science Technology Office has emphasized new technology concepts in NASA’s New Observing Strategies, such as SmallSat solutions with distributed and constellation architectures and onboard processing capabilities. However, to enable advanced onboard computing, NASA requires more cutting-edge single-board computers to support complex algorithms and modern development flows. Traditionally, onboard processing is limited to fully radiation-hardened computer systems, typically technology generations behind consumer electronics and more restrictive with size, power efficiency, and cost. To address these concerns, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has developed the SpaceCube family of processors that combines radiation-hardened and commercial-off-the-shelf components to produce high-performance, yet reliable systems that leverage modern design tools. To demonstrate capabilities of the next-generation SpaceCube v3.0 Mini processor, a flight design for StereoBit, a high-priority decadal survey Earth-science application, was implemented. StereoBit addresses the challenge of probing structure and dynamics of atmosphere in three dimensions using multi-angle, multiplatform stereo methods. This paper illustrates the design process of transforming StereoBit science-application C code to hardware description language for Field Programmable Gate Arrays using High-Level Synthesis. This paper then presents results of StereoBit on SpaceCube v3.0 Mini and discusses advantages of High-Level Synthesis over traditional flows for application design-space exploration.