Designing systems for operation on manned spacecraft presents unique challenges arising primarily from two areas: the space radiation environment is more severe than that on the Earth's surface and the restricted access to hardware once launched limits response to system component failure. The MIM includes a combination of hardware and software health monitoring to detect and in most cases automatically recover from SEUs. The modular architecture of the electronics allows carrying spare modules that are easily replaced on orbit and addresses the maintainability issue. MIM-2 takes advantage of a multiprocessing architecture to achieve the system design goal of implementing an effective isolation while ensuring a modular and robust hardware platform. The experiment controller adds flexibility to the system by providing multiple user configurable I/O channels and associated control algorithms. The planned real-time analysis capability will add efficiency to MIM-2 by providing on-line analysis and pre-processing of data generated by experiments.
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