SpaceCube is a family of high-performance reconfigurable systems designed for spaceflight applications requiring on-board processing. The SpaceCube was developed by engineers at the

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C., in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959, as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC ...

. The SpaceCube 1.0 system is based on Xilinx's Virtex-4 commercial

FPGAs A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices (PLDs). They consist of a ...

. The debut mission of the SpaceCube 1.0, Hubble Servicing Mission 4, was the first time Xilinx's Virtex-4 FPGAs flew in

space Space is a three-dimensional continuum containing positions and directions. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions. Modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless ...

Missions

* Hubble Servicing Mission 4: The SpaceCube was the brains of the Relative Navigation Sensors autonomous docking experiment that was intended to run in parallel with the

astronaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a List of human spaceflight programs, human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member of a spa ...

controlled docking of the

Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the Orbiting Solar Observatory, first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most ...

. RNS met its stated goals. * MISSE-7: The SpaceCube was attached to the outside of the

ISS The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), ESA (Europe), ...

during an EVA on

Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable launch system, reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. ...

Mission

STS-129 STS-129 (ISS assembly sequence, ISS assembly flight ULF3) was a NASA Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS). ''Space Shuttle Atlantis, Atlantis'' was launched on November 16, 2009, at 14:28 Eastern Time Zone, EST, and lan ...

(Nov 2009). It provides an on-orbit test platform for demonstrating innovative radiation hardened by software techniques. It is mounted on the

NRL The National Rugby League (also known as the NRL Telstra Premiership for sponsorship reasons) is a professional rugby league competition in Oceania which contains clubs from New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria (state), Victoria, the Austral ...

's MISSE7 experiment which is attach to an

ExPRESS Logistics Carrier An EXpedite the PRocessing of Experiments to Space Station (ExPRESS) Logistics Carrier (ELC) is an International Space Station#Unpressurised elements, unpressurized attached payload platform for the International Space Station (ISS) that provides ...

.Astronauts Install SpaceCube on International Space Station
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Family overview

* SpaceCube 1.0: Based on Xilinx's Virtex-4 commercial FPGAs. * SpaceCube 1.5: Intermediate version of SpaceCube 2.0. Based on Xilinx's Virtex-5 commercial

. Scheduled to fly on

sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are often ...

flight in the fall of 2010. * SpaceCube 2.0: Currently under development with over $1 million in funding. The SpaceCube 2.0 system is based around

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also pioneered ...

's new radiation-hardened Virtex-5 FPGA.

Awards

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center SpaceCube team earned an honorable mention for the 2009 "IRAD Innovator of the Year" award.

On-board science data processing achievements

Synthetic Aperture Radar Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) is a form of radar that is used to create two-dimensional images or 3D reconstruction, three-dimensional reconstructions of objects, such as landscapes. SAR uses the motion of the radar antenna over a target regi ...

(SAR) results: ** 6 to 1 loss-less data volume reduction on SAR Nadir Altimetry dataset. ** 165x data volume reduction on SAR mapping dataset.

References

External links

PowerPC405 MIPS StudySpaceCube on FacebookA pose and position measurement system for the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission

Summer 2008 Goddard Tech TrendsMAPLD 2009 RNS SpaceCubeMAPLD 2009 SpaceCube ActivitiesRHBD Xilinx Virtex-5Heavy ion SEE test of Xilinx Virtex4 XC4VFX60 FPGASpaceCube Virtex-4 FPGA qualification methodologySpring 2009 Goddard News Tech TransferXilinx XCell Journal Customer Innovation Issue
;Media
SpaceCube Photo Gallery on FlickrSpaceCube in Atlantis Shuttle bay
The SpaceCube is mounted on the MISSE-7 ExPA on ELC-2 on the bottom right.)
SpaceCube mounted to MISSE7's ExPA
The SpaceCube is the smaller box with several connectors on top)
Naval Research Lab's MISSE-7 Press Release
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spacecube Hubble Space Telescope Goddard Space Flight Center Satellite buses