Today NASA announced the winners of the 2016 NASA Phase 1 awards. Yosemite Space was awarded a Phase 1 proposal to develop the Resilient Affordable Cubesat Processor (RACP).

RACP will be a power-efficient high-performance space computer designed for low-Earth orbit (LEO) and deep space missions. RACP’s hybrid design combines the state of the art ARM System on Chip (SoC) processors with a non-radiation-hard-by-design FPGA and a radiation tolerant microcontroller to deliver fault tolerance, data integrity, and scalable performance. RACP’s physical dimensions and low power consumption make it ideal for vehicles as small as CubeSats. RACP includes custom health monitoring software that continuously watches vulnerable components for potential latch-up or degradation due to radiation exposure and takes corrective action as needed.  RACP will consume between 0.83 to 8.7 Watts of peak power depending on clock speed and workload.  At the high end, its compute performance will exceed 25,000 Dhrystone Millions of Instructions Per Second (MIPS), 2,100 Whetstone Millions of Floating Point Operations Per Second (MFLOPS) and 9,200 Whetstone Millions of Fixed Point Operations Per Second (MOPS).

This past week, Dr. Kathleen Morse spoke at the 13th Annual CubeSat Developers Workshop at Cal Poly.  She presented the Miles mission and discussed how the Resilient Affordable Cubesat Processor (RACP) is enabling mission autonomy through its high performance and resiliency.