  Modern satellite based experiments are often very complex real-time systems,
composed by flight and ground segments, that have challenging resource related
constraints, in terms of size, weight, power, requirements for real-time
response, fault tolerance, and specialized input/output hardware-software, and
they must be certified to high levels of assurance. Hardware-software data
processing systems have to be responsive to system degradation and to changes
in the data acquisition modes, and actions have to be taken to change the
organization of the mission operations. A big research & develop effort in a
team composed by scientists and technologists can lead to produce software
systems able to optimize the hardware to reach very high levels of performance
or to pull degraded hardware to maintain satisfactory features. We'll show
real-life examples describing a system, processing the data of a X-Ray detector
on satellite-based mission in spinning mode.
