Spacecraft Onboard Data Handling
SpaceWire is a communications network used to connect together data-handling sub-systems onboard spacecraft. The SpaceWire standard was written by Parkes, with input from spacecraft engineers across Europe, and issued by the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) in 2003. SpaceWire is now being used on many ESA, JAXA and NASA missions (the latter hosting a Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship from Dundee) including the Bepi Colombo mission to Mercury, GAIA, JWST and GOES-R. The group has also designed the SpaceWire interface IP block which is distributed under licence by ESA and is being used by at least 30 space organisations in Europe, and has designed the SpaceWire Router chip which is being manufactured under license by Atmel. The first international IEEE SpaceWire conference was chaired by Parkes and hosted at Dundee in 2007 (it will be in Osaka in 2008 and Moscow in 2009). Plans include the specification of the new higher speed SpaceFibre protocol.
Space Technology Centre website: www.spacetech.dundee.ac.uk
STAR-Dundee website: www.star-dundee.com
People working within this theme: Iain Martin, Steve Parkes, Jonathan Bowyer, Martin Dunstan, Ray Manston, Chris McClements, Peter Mendham, Stuart Mills, Albert Ferrer
Research projects related to this theme: Next Generation Mass Memory Architecture
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