Enhancing the Utility of Hosted Payloads Using MOSA Approaches

ABSTRACT: Incorporating hosted payloads onto satellites deployed for other primary missions is an approach that has the potential to provide benefits to both the hosted payload user community and the host satellite providers. But getting rides to space and accommodation on a dedicated satellite bus in the current climate of shrinking budgets is becoming increasingly difficult. Opening up opportunities to occupy slots on commercial satellite busses is a practical possibility for these cases. On the other side, the owners of potential commercial hosting platforms may benefit financially from the revenue that can be collected from selling satellite bus"real-estate"available due to excess SWaP margin not allocated to the primary payload. PnP Innovations is proposing to leverage the SPA standards to create a Hosted Payload architecture that offers MOSA features to the potential user community. We will develop a Hosted Payload Interface Unit (HPIU) that standardizes the interface to payloads and offers a configurable daughter card option to handle the less malleable host side interface. SPA does not currently provide the features necessary to protect system users from unauthorized access to sensitive operational data. This research will address that concern by extending the SPA standards to include multi-layer security. BENEFIT: If space flight becomes more accessible because of the proposed hosted payload architecture technologies, there is broad appeal to a significant user community. The diversity of that community extends to government and military agencies, universities, and commercial companies. If an integration standard for payloads is agreed-to, it will be much easier to promote widespread use of the concept. Developers and integrators alike will enjoy the determinism associated with developing a flight experiment to a known interface. If the architecture is similarly well-defined, it will be easy for any of these users to interact with their deployed payloads from their own sites on the internet. Universities and commercial companies seeking space research options or qualification of hardware would have many more opportunities to access rides. A low-cost developer"s kit (which we would develop and commercialize in this SBIR track) would enable those users. Major government use cases include potential NASA experiments accommodated on commercial platforms, and military use of the secure architecture to host SSA sensors on commercial host platforms to provide more comprehensive and robust worldwide coverage to detect and respond to non-deterministic events. The standards extensions proposed in this SBIR to implement multi-layer security benefit SPA in any domain that it is applied to. As an optional feature of a plug and play system, it provides protection in cases where preventing unauthorized access to data in an open or loosely-regulated network is a user requirement.