Avionics Systems the useful “glue”

This article will help you understand one of the core parts of space engineering.

Avionics is the science and technology of electronics and the development of electronic devices as applied to aeronautics and astronautics has become even more important with the development of the space program.

Avionics includes all vehicle electrical and electronic systems, such as telemetry, communications and data handling, flight computers, sensors and instrumentation, the electrical power system to include harnesses and cabling. The most difficult avionics design task is making equipment for operation in outer space.

The avionics systems for a typical vehicle can be thought of as the “glue” that holds together, interfaces, and coordinates together the different subsystems onboard, and enables communication, command, and control function to take place to both ground-based and space-based mission control.

Functions that an avionics system must perform typically include vehicle and data management, telemetry and command, navigation, guidance, flight control, propulsion systems control, mechanism control, power management and distribution, environmental control, payload accommodations (commands, data, response, services), collision avoidance (maneuvers), and range safety.

Architecture is an important driver in the avionics system design. You can find great info and details in the published paper (by IEEE): Design space exploration of avionics architectures for Future Launcher Evolutions

In older systems it was typical to use a federated architecture, involving discrete subsystems interconnected by a standard serial bus.

For 2000s designs an integrated architecture with loosely coupled interconnects appears most frequently.

For next generation systems massively parallel processors will blur the distinction between mission and core processing.

It must be noted that currently the avionics system for the Future Launcher Evolutions of the EU is under development.

The sensor electronics represent a dominant portion approximately 2/3 of the entire avionics cost.

Although special apertures (i.e., antennas, optical lenses) account for much of this cost, the signal conditioning and distribution electronics are also quite expensive.

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