Description: NASA's new mission requirements for complex autonomous operations, high-end sensor processing, swarm/constellation management, planetary/lunar landing, and autonomous exploration missions, require novel onboard processing approaches because rad-hard processors do not offer enough performance and COTS alone do not meet criticality requirements. The significance of Troxel Aerospace’s SEFI/SEU Mitigation Middleware (SMM) innovation is that it is the only feasible technology that provides a path to enabling these types of missions by allowing high-performance COTS processors to operate with a high degree of fault tolerance without the need for rad-hard electronics, and thus simultaneously meets advanced missions’ criticality and performance requirements. Troxel Aerospace has demonstrated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6 capability of the SMM through deployment and extensive radiation testing, and the proposed Sequential Phase II program is necessary to finish the maturation of the technology to TRL8 and deploy it with one of several mission opportunities.

Benefits: The SMM enables high-performance, radiation-tolerant crew displays; applications for astronaut HUDs and augmented reality displays; pinpoint landing, hazard avoidance, rendezvous-and-capture, surface mobility, and science operations on the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies of interest such as Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; system-level solutions for GPU technologies for crewed vehicles, including space suits; and several mission categories from Artemis to Gateway to NASA’s greater science and exploration goals.

DoD, and commercial remote sensing, autonomous spacecraft operations and other advanced processing capabilities, particularly for New Space companies that are discovering that they need improved reliability and COTS-processor performance levels.