Autonomous safeing and fault protection for the New Horizons mission to Pluto

The New Horizons spacecraft now bound for the planet Pluto and beyond to the Kuiper belt was successfully launched on January 19, 2006. The New Horizons spacecraft has backup devices for its major electronic modules, and also has a heavily cross-strapped architecture that makes the spacecraft fully tolerant of almost all single-point failures. The onboard fault protection system detects failure of a component and autonomously activates the backup system as necessary. The onboard safeing system detects anomalies in spacecraft performance, such as attitude control errors or propulsion system problems, and then autonomously places the spacecraft into one of two safe states. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.