Today, the amount of telemetry data from the sensors in the upper stages of a launch vehicle is very restricted, due to limited on-board-processing capacities combined with limited data bandwidth to ground. As a result, no detailed information about the various phases of the flight is available.
Massively extended Modular Monitoring for Upper Stages (MaMMoTH-Up) represents a permanent adaptable experiment opportunity located on the ARIANE5 (A5) Vehicle Equipment Bay. Protected by a dedicated container design it shall make extensive use of Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware and advanced software to achieve its ambitious data collection, processing and compression tasks. This COTS approach is secured by tailored dependability technics to ensure a reliable operation in the demanding space environment. To downlink the gathered, processed and compressed data MaMMoTH will make use of the A5 telemetry subsystem acting as a peripheral data acquisition unit once a standard A5 mission is completed. A future application also on ARIANE6 is envisaged.
MaMMoTH-Up will improve the amount of monitored data by a factor of more than 2500 by integrating four key objectives, which are
1. a self-configuring monitoring framework that will selectively observe, pre-process, and compress sensor data,
2. COTS components that provide improved computing performance on a launcher,
3. design solutions guaranteeing the required levels of dependability, even when using relatively unreliable COTS components, and
4. a tight coupling with advanced dependability analysis.
