In recent years, as an important frontier of astronautics, micro-satellites have been widely used for various space-oriented missions. During various on-board components, the on-board computer (OBC) is essential to take charge of many tasks such as command and data handing, communication and payload management. However, the resources on micro-satellites are so limited that the OBC should not only meet the requirements of excellent performance and high reliability, but also be in proper power

more »

... sumption and cost. The purpose of this paper is to present a solution for developing a low-cost, low power consumption and reliable OBC system for micro-satellites. The proposed system is based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components and Linux operating system. Besides, considering the harsh space environment, a set of fault tolerant strategies are introduced to improve the reliability of the OBC. Finally, the analysis and test results are provided to illustrate the relatively low-cost, low power consumption and high reliability of the proposed OBC system.