Comment on Flights disrupted after Airbus discovers intense sun radiation could impact flight control data
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 1 day agoI work in the software industry and I have a guess regarding what the might do to “fix” the problem.
First, we look for the cause, but in this case it is external: we can’t prevent solar flares. So we will turn to mitigation instead:
Data gets flaky and erratic unter radiation, so what we would do is to double- and triple-check the data bits. By adding more levels of data correction, more bits can be wrong and we can still figure what it was supposed to be.
Adding more corrections means more overhead and slower performance, but it can still be made to work within the given constraints of real-time processing. They will need to find a balance between hardening and usefulness.
frongt@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Is it a software fix? Or are they adding shielding around the flight control system or something?
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The articles I saw mentioned that it would be fixed in software.
piranhaconda@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Sounds like SEE (single event effect) if it’s something fixable by software.
TID (total ionizing dose) is a other flavor of radiation effect on components, but that’s a total lifetime effect where it slowly degrades. Using rad hard parts or adding extra shielding is the main fix.
SEEs are transient effects from high energy charged particles that can cause bit flips and latch ups in circuitry depending on where the particle hits and deposits it’s charge in the circuitry. Extra shielding can help prevent these as well, but they can also be mitigated in software, sometimes the fix is just error detection and having the errored signal resent, or power cycling a specific section of circuitry to clear a latchup