A smart way to meet increased mission needs, both in data management (available mass memory) and in data transmission (bandwidth), is moving data processing from the ground segment to space, developing ad-hoc On-board Payload Data Processing capabilities, looking at automatic data selection (based on features) and autonomous tasking. The Space Payload Data Processing system is a structured framework intended to ease the development of such capabilities.

Born from a Research and Development project co-financed by the Italian Space Agency, carried out by Planetek Italia in cooperation with SITAEL (a company specializing in on-board hardware systems) and GEO-K (spin-off of the University of Tor Vergata), the project followed an open and modular development philosophy; the adoption of a software part derived from open source projects allowed the development of the components around a main core, designed in turn to be used on different hardware.

spacePDP is composed of independent hardware and software modules and completed by a specifically designed IDE (Integrated Development Environment), including a user GUI (Graphical User Interface).

spacePDP has been used in different operational conditions, both for SW (RTEMS and VxWorks) and HW (LEON2 and 3, DSP, ARM) and it is well suited to provide mission’s standard tasks (e.g. TM/TC, sensors control, mass memory management, uplink and downlink) and mission specific tasks as scientific data processing.

spacePDP fits both on satellite platforms and on planetary exploration rovers and it is currently used for the scientific data processing and compression in the Solar Wind Analyzer instrument suite onboard of Solar Orbiter and in the development of OP3C, a novel hyperspectral data cubes compression module.