BENCHMARKING REMOTE SENSING IMAGE PROCESSING AND MISSION PLANNING APPLICATIONS ON THE SNAPDRAGON PROCESSOR ONBOARD THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

Future space missions will process and analyze imagery onboard and plan and act more autonomously placing greater demands on flight computing. Traditional flight hardware provides modest compute, even when compared to laptop and desktop computers. A new generation of commercial off the shelf (COTS) processors, such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon, deliver significant compute in a small Size Weight and Power (SWaP) and offer direct hardware acceleration in the form of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and Digital Signal Processors (DSP). We benchmark a variety of instrument processing and mission planning software on a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC currently hosted by HPE’s Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2) onboard the International Space Station.