Enlarge / Individuals look inside an Orion spacecraft simulator, which is used to coach for docking to the Gateway house station, on the Johnson House Heart’s System Engineering Simulator facility in Houston. (credit score: Getty Photos)
Wednesday’s scheduled launch by NASA of the Artemis I mission would be the first built-in take a look at of the company’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in growth for 16 years and are anticipated to usher in a brand new period of house exploration. The uncrewed mission may even be solely the second time a community normal generally known as time-triggered Ethernet has been taken into house, with the primary being Orion’s orbital take a look at flight in 2014.
Time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) is an instance of a mixed-criticality community, which is able to routing site visitors with differing ranges of timing and totally different fault tolerance necessities over the identical set of {hardware}. Till now, spacecraft typically relied on one community to transmit safety-critical or mission-critical messages and a number of fully segregated ones for carrying video conferencing and different varieties of less-critical site visitors.
Illustration of how time-triggered Ethernet works. (credit score: TTTech)
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Orion is the primary spacecraft to depend on a TTE community to route mixed-criticality site visitors, whether or not, NASA says, it is for important techniques like navigation and life help, file transfers which might be essential for supply however not timing, or non-critical duties equivalent to crew videoconferencing. TTE—which may even be utilized in NASA’s Lunar Gateway house station and the ESA’s Ariane 6 launcher—is essential for lowering the scale, weight, price, and energy necessities of recent spacecraft.
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