A team led by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman sent its SpaceWire data bus technology for preliminary design review.
    The development marks a milestone in the risk reduction phase of the U.S. Air Force‘s Transformational Satellite Communications System (TSAT) constellation, the companies said.
The SpaceWire bus technology, a self-managing serial protocol, provides on-orbit satellite internal communications for box-to-box and system-to-system data transfer that is equivalent to a local area network in space. The unit also has the capability to assist the in-flight processor by offloading repetitive tasks to the embedded SpaceWire processor and reduce cabling by providing the capability to combine many different kinds of signals onto two single conductor pairs.

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