Building Blocks for the Future: TRL 10 and 11 Commercial Spacecraft Avionics

Abstract

One of the obstacles to achieving a cost-effective high-reliability paradigm has been the need to reinvent the command and data handling infrastructure on a spacecraft by spacecraft basis. The availability of a family of commercial spacecraft avionics units with extensive reliable flight heritage offers an attractive approach to efficiently implement a spacecraft bus tailored to support specific mission needs without the concomitant redesign, redevelopment, or requalification of the avionics framework. In 2019 P. Lord et al. [1] defined Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) 10 and TRL 11 by expanding upon the need identified by J. Straub in 2015 [2] for a TRL beyond level 9. They extended TRL 9 (“Flight Proven Technology”) by defining TRL 10 as “Reliable Flight Proven Technology” and level 11 as “Mature Flight Proven Technology”. Maxar's avionics units, with extensive flight heritage in the commercial GEO market, offer TRL 10 and TRL 11 building blocks enabling a customized architecture to accommodate varied missions, from a deep space asteroid rendezvous (Psyche), to robotic servicing in LEO (Restore-L), to forming the basis of the Lunar Gateway with the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE). The Maxar catalog includes a RAD750 based central processor and a hardware level commanding unit as well as units specialized for temperature sensor acquisition, analog voltage measurement, digital control and monitoring, pyrotechnic device control and monitoring, heater control, generic relay control, launch vehicle umbilical discharge event isolation, and ESD hazard mitigation. The Maxar avionics family is integrated via a highly scalable serial data bus architecture. Every unit offers redundancy and full cross-strapping may be implemented for even higher mission reliability. This paper illustrates the scalability of the Maxar avionics family and includes details of unit capabilities on-orbit data based failure rate estimates, and TRL level as well as their itemization on the Psyche, Restore-L, and PPE spacecraft.