Supporting Multi-Purpose Satellite with TZ2C Onboard Processing Capabilities

The centralized control of satellites will hinder the efficient utilization of large-scale constellations, due to long time delay, large data volume transmission, high planning complexity, etc. As a distributed solution, orbital edge computing requires high-performance computation on spacecrafts to support multiple tasks such as planning, remote sensing detection, adaptive transmission, and other arbitrary applications installation if needed. In this paper, the latest-launched TZ2C satellite is described as one demonstration to provide support for various tasks based on its hardware acceleration, software deployment, as well the interactions with high-level task-related applications. As the "brain" of TZ2C infrastructure, the microsystem is elaborated including hardware and software design, together with the remote updating facilities. The in-orbit experiment design and preliminary results are also discussed to show the performance and flexibility in fulfilling various space tasks autonomously.