Mars Attacks! Software Protection Against Space Radiation

Due to their low cost and the need to run computationally- intensive algorithms locally, satellites and spacecrafts are increasingly employing off-the-shelf computing hardware. How- ever, hardware in space is exposed to significantly higher amounts of radiation than on Earth, causing hardware to permanently fail and affecting the correct functioning of the application. We envision that solely using software fault tolerance techniques, commodity hardware operating in space can achieve fault tolerance equivalent 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 corruptions. 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 an orders of magnitude improvement in the compute capabilities and cost of low-earth orbit satellites.