The two-year ASTRAEUS project is funded by the European Space Agency under the ARTES 4.0 program - Implementation of software mitigation solutions for radiation-induced single event effects.

The project aims to enhance the use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices in space telecommunications applications by developing advanced radiation mitigation techniques for both hardware and software components, with a particular emphasis on software. The objective is to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of these techniques, paving the way for their future adoption in payload processing units.

A central approach of the project is Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance. This involves adapting a conventional compilation toolchain to automatically identify temporary faults and apply fault-tolerant strategies. The successful completion of ASTRAEUS will de-risk the adoption of software-based radiation mitigation techniques and promote the use of high-performance yet cost-effective COTS electronics in space missions.

As part of the project, a space-optimized telecommunications application, provided by Argotec, will be implemented on a hardware-software platform. Using laser-induced Single Event Upsets, faults will be injected to test the robustness of the developed fault detection and mitigation methodologies.

The project is coordinated by the HEAPLab at DEIB, Politecnico di Milano. At the conclusion of the project, an open-source tool called ASPIS (a plug-in of LLVM) will be released. This tool will enable the automatic modification of source code to enhance applications with built-in fault detection mechanisms.