Nebula Public Library

Over the last decades, the spaceborne remote sensing community has been focused on the development of imaging radars at RF frequencies such as S-band, L-band, C-band and X-band.

ITU regulations currently permit the use of Ka-band for active spaceborne microwave remote sensing but only few missions are considering applying this frequency band such as the SARAL mission with the ALtiKa instrument (launched 2013).

The main goal of this Ariadna study was to determine the radiation hardness of potential future space processors. The AR0 test-chip was used to study the impact of SEUs and SETs on different versions of a hardened processor on UTBB-FDSOI 28nm technology, including DICE flip-flops, and three different hardening level of combinational logic.

At present, the largest part of the catalogued space debris population consists of fragments originating from accidental explosions of spacecraft and upper stages, but it is expected that hypervelocity collisions involving large objects could become the primary source of new debris in the mid-term future. In this context, understanding the physical processes involved in spacecraft collisions is crucial, because these big impacts are one of the key drivers of the long-term evolution of the amount of space debris.