Experiment in Onboard Synthetic Aperture Radar Data Processing

Single event upsets (SEUs) are a threat to any computing system running on hardware that has not been physically radiation hardened. In addition to mandating the use of performance- limited, hardened heritage equipment, prior techniques for dealing with the SEU problem often involved hardware- based error detection and correction (EDAC). With limited computing resources, software-based EDAC, or any more elaborate recovery methods, were often not feasible. Synthetic aperture radars (SARs), when operated in the space environment, are interesting due to their relevance to NASAs objectives, but problematic in the sense of producing prodigious amounts of “raw” data. Prior implementations of the SAR data processing algorithm have been too slow, too computationally intensive, and require too much application memory for onboard execution to be a realistic option when using the type of heritage processing technology described above.