A novel autonomous low-cost on-board data handling architecture for a pin-point planetary lander

There has been increased interest in the exploration of the Moon in recent years. Pin-point precision landing is highly desirable for future lunar missions. This paper is concerned with the design of the on-board data handling (OBDH) subsystem for the pin-point lunar lander of the Magnolia-1 project, funded by NASA. Four proposed on-board data handling architectures are outlined and compared in terms of power consumption, performance and reliability. Implementation results are presented, which are obtained from prototyping of the flight computer for the optimal OBDH architecture option on a Xilinx Virtex-5 Field Programmable Gate Array.