David Petrick
SpaceCube: Current Missions and Technology Advancement

Wednesday, September 30 , 2009
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM

The GSFC SpaceCube, a compact reconfigurable high-performance processing platform, was successfully flown as part of the Relative Navigation Sensors (RNS) system, a payload on the STS-125 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Mission 4. The main objectives of RNS were to record images of HST during the mission and prove real-time tracking capabilities. SpaceCube was responsible for a variety of RNS tasks including avionics control, two real-time image processing algorithms for position and attitude estimation, command and data handling, camera automatic gain control, JPEG2000 image compression, and Space Shuttle Ku-band interfacing. This presentation will feature how the SpaceCube enabled all RNS objectives. This presentation will also highlight various other SpaceCube projects and technology advances. In particular, GSFC is sending another SpaceCube to the ISS as an experimental processing platform. Two new versions of the SpaceCube are also in the works. The first is targeted for small-scale missions like sounding rocket avionics. The second is targeted for long-term missions requiring high reliability like those of the Earth Science Decadal missions.

David Petrick has worked for NASA since 2000. He is currently the Embedded Processing group leader within the Science Data Processing Branch (Code 587) and development lead on SpaceCube 2.0. He has a BSEE Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a MSEE from Johns Hopkins University. Dave started his career applying reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology to implement hardware acceleration to software systems, demonstrating the effectiveness of on-board data processing. He then worked with the Xilinx Radiation Test Consortium to test the susceptibilities of the complex processing features found in Xilinx FPGAs. During the development of SpaceCube, he started as the lead Xilinx FPGA designer, and then took the role of flight processor card lead engineer. He was then the SpaceCube responsible engineer for the Relative Navigation Sensors, a HST SM4 payload, and supported STS-125 servicing mission operations at the Mission Control Center, Houston. Dave is also the lead engineer for a SpaceCube set to launch on STS-129 to the space station that will serve as a NASA test bed for radiation mitigation strategies.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Ben Kobler

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