European Space Agency co-funds a HEAP Lab research project on Spacecraft Computers

Federico Reghenzani, post-doc at HEAP Lab, proposed the three-year research project “Mixed-Criticality Fault-Tolerant Systems for the Future Generation of Spacecraft Computers”, which has been selected by the Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The project, co-funded by ESA and DEIB’s HEAP Lab, will be developed by Federico under the supervision of Prof. William Fornaciari.

The project goal is to investigate how to integrate several real-time applications, with multiple criticalities, on a single computing platform. The scientific challenges include the mixed-criticality schedulability analysis of the real-time tasks and the necessity to guarantee high resilience to faults, a significant problem present in the extreme environmental conditions of space.

The presence in this project of both the university component with DEIB and the final user represented by ESA makes possible, on the one hand, the investigation of novel academic solutions, and, on the other hand, the access to ESA ESTEC laboratories to validate the project outputs on real space-graded hardware and software.