Autonomous redundancy management on the DMSP spacecraft

The enhancement of reliability and orbital life for the Block 5D-2 spacecraft is a major objective of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, having as its specific goals the elimination of single-point failures and the maximization of fault tolerance by means of an on-board, autonomous redundancy control strategy. A novel software function has been developed which performs automatic fault detection and manages the reconfiguration of redundant software and hardware. Because of the redundant software's complexity, the control system must use a symptomatic approach to fault isolation and allow a manual override capability. Orbital experience with the proposed system has shown hardware redundancy and software monitoring to extend satellite service life.