NASA’s Small Spacecraft Avionics chapter, listed as section 8.0 on page 219 and updated in 2026, identifies radiation mitigation, onboard computing, processor architectures, and autonomy as central avionics concerns. It describes watchdog timers and selective power cycling as mitigation strategies, while NASA’s High-Performance Spaceflight Computing project is developing a radiation-tolerant, multi-GFLOPS CPU with extremely low power consumption.[1][2]
For a lunar civilisation archive, radiation is both a hardware-failure hazard and a data-preservation threat. Increasing onboard computational capability increases sensitivity to radiation, making autonomous fault detection, recovery, command authentication, and cybersecurity essential for maintaining life-support, power, thermal-control, robotics, and archival systems during solar events or communications outages. The document also notes that more distant and dynamic missions are driving advanced fault-tolerant designs and greater autonomy.[1][2]
The Ark team should track NASA’s High-Performance Spaceflight Computing project, evaluate radiation-tolerant multi-GFLOPS processors for supervisory and archival-control systems, and specify watchdog timers, selective power cycling, redundant computing paths, authenticated commands, and independent safe modes in avionics requirements. Qualification should include lunar radiation testing, long-duration fault-injection trials, graceful degradation, and recovery without Earth contact; cybersecurity should be treated as a preservation requirement because NASA expects more sophisticated protections as space becomes more crowded.[2]