The Radiative Transfer Equation inversion on FPGA. the case of the Photospheric Magnetic field Imager

Part of the Proceedings of the 2023 European Data Handling and Data Processing Conference for Space (EDHPC 2023) Juan-Les-Pins2 October 2023 through 6 October 2023. Code 196870We present the radiative transfer equation (RTE) inverter core, a high performance SIMD architecture, to interpret the data obtained by the Polarimetric and Magnetic field Imager (PMI) instrument aboard the ESA's Vigil mission. After some pre-processing, the spectropolarimetric data will be translated on board into physical quantities of the solar atmosphere to be directly downloaded to Earth, hence strongly reducing the telemetry needs of such a deep space mission. The RTE inverter is direct heritage from that in the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) aboard the ESA/NASA's Solar Orbiter mission. The more stringent requirements of Vigil as compared to Solar Orbiter, as well as the production discontinuation of the FPGA used in the PHI instrument, have driven the migration of the inverter architecture to a brand-new, more powerful FPGA device (Xilinx Kintex UltraScale XQRKU060). © 2023 ESA.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been funded by AEI/MCIN/10.13039/ 501100011033/ (RTI2018-096886-C5, PID2021-125325OB-C5, PCI2022-135009-2) and ERDF “A way of making Europe”; “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” awards to IAA-CSIC (SEV-2017-0709, CEX2021-001131-S); and a Ramón y Cajal fellowship awarded to DOS

SINBAD electronic models of the interface and control system for the NOMAD spectrometer on board of ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission

NOMAD is a spectrometer suite: UV-visible-IR spectral ranges. NOMAD is part of the payload of ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mission. SINBAD boards are in charge of the communication and management of the power and control between the spacecraft and the instrument channels. SINBAD development took four years, while the entire development and test required five years, a very short time to develop an instrument devoted to a space mission. The hardware of SINBAD is shown in the attached poster: developed boards, prototype boards and final models. The models were delivered to the ESA in order to testing and integration with the spacecraft

SINBAD flight software, the on board software of NOMAD in ExoMars 2016

The Spacecraft INterface and control Board for NomAD (SINBAD) is an electronic interface designed by the Instituto de Astroffisica de Andalucfia (IAA-CSIC). It is part of the Nadir and Occultation for MArs Discovery instrument (NOMAD) on board in the ESAs ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission. This mission was launched in March 2016. The SINBAD Flight Software (SFS) is the software embedded in SINBAD. It is in charge of managing the interfaces, devices, data, observing sequences, patching and contingencies of NOMAD. It is presented in this paper the most remarkable aspects of the SFS design, likewise the main problems and lessons learned during the software development process

SPGCam: A specifically tailored camera for solar observations

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Designing a new astronomical instrument typically challenges the available cameras on the market. In many cases, no camera can fulfill the requirements of the instrument in terms of photon budget, speed, and even interfaces with the rest of the instrument. In this situation, the only options are to either downgrade the performance of the instrument or design new cameras from scratch, provided it is possible to identify a compliant detector. The latter is the case of the SPGCams, the cameras developed to be used with the Tunable Magnetograph (TuMag) and the Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectroPolarimeter (SCIP) for the Sunrise iii mission. SPGCams have been designed, developed, and built entirely in-house by the Solar Physics Group (SPG) at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC). We report here on the scientific rationale and system engineering requirements set by the two instruments that drove the development, as well as on the technical details and trade-offs used to fulfill the specifications. The cameras were fully verified before the flight, and results from the assembly and verification campaign are presented as well. SPGCams share the design, although some parametric features differentiate the visible cameras (for TuMag) and the IR ones (for SCIP). Even though they were specifically developed for the Sunrise iii mission, the robust and careful design makes them suitable for different applications in other astronomical instruments. © 2023 Orozco Suárez, Álvarez García, López Jiménez, Balaguer Jiménez, Hernández Expósito, Labrousse, Bailén, Bustamante Díaz, Bailón Martínez, Aparicio del Moral, Morales Fernández, Sánchez Gómez, Tobaruela Abarca, Moreno Mantas, Ramos Más, Pérez Grande, Piqueras Carreño, Katsukawa, Kubo, Kawabata, Oba, Rodríguez Valido, Magdaleno Castelló and Del Toro Iniesta.This work was funded by the Spanish MCIN/AEI, under projects RTI 2018-096886-B-C5, PID 2021-125325OB-C5, and PCI 2022-135009-2, and co-funded by European FEDER funds, “A way of making Europe,” under grants CEX 2021-001131-S and 10.13039/501100011033.Peer reviewe

Expected Performances of the NOMAD/ExoMars instrument

NOMAD (Nadir and Occultation for MArs Discovery) is one of the four instruments on board the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, scheduled for launch in March 2016. It consists of a suite of three high-resolution spectrometers – SO (Solar Occultation), LNO (Limb, Nadir and Occultation) and UVIS (Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer). Based upon the characteristics of the channels and the values of Signal-to-Noise Ratio obtained from radiometric models discussed in [Vandaele et al., Optics Express, 2015] and [Thomas et al., Optics Express, 2015], the expected performances of the instrument in terms of sensitivity to detection have been investigated. The analysis led to the determination of detection limits for 18 molecules, namely CO, H2O, HDO, C2H2, C2H4, C2H6, H2CO, CH4, SO2, H2S, HCl, HCN, HO2, NH3, N2O, NO2, OCS, O3. NOMAD should have the ability to measure methane concentrations <25 parts per trillion (ppt) in solar occultation mode, and 11 parts per billion in nadir mode. Occultation detections as low as 10 ppt could be made if spectra are averaged [Drummond et al., Planetary Space and Science, 2011]. Results have been obtained for all three channels in nadir and in solar occultation

The quick RTE inversion on FPGA for DKIST

In this contribution we present a multi-core system-on-chip, embedded on FPGA, for real-time data processing, to be used in the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST). Our system will provide "quick-look" magnetic field vector and line-of-sight velocity maps to help solar physicists to react to specific solar events or features during observations or to address specific phenomena while analyzing the data off line. The stand-alone device will be installed at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) Data Center. It will be integrated in the processing data pipeline through a software interface, and is competitive in computing speed to complex computer clusters. © 2018 SPIE.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, through Project No. ESP2016-77548-C5-1-R, including a percentage from European FEDER funds

Implementation of a Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Ethernet Bus for Microlaunchers

The design of the aerospace systems for future aircraft requires the identification of new suitable communication infrastructures that can overcome the limitations that often come with the use of the legacy, albeit well-proven, protocols that are routinely integrated into aerospace. This allows us to overcome the bandwidth constraints, large deployment costs, or the lack of flexibility of other alternatives, such as SpaceWire, or legacy systems, such as the MIL-STD-1553B bus. These protocols can be replaced with new technologies that can fulfill the greater real-time and interconnectivity demands of advanced scientific probes or manned spacecraft. The advent of the new microlauncher systems has all but confirmed this trend. In this context, we describe the design and implementation of a time-sensitive networking (TSN) bus for the avionics of the Miura 1 suborbital microlauncher. TSN represents an appropriate interface for this type of platform given its ability to provide the determinism and reliability expected in space-grade systems in combination with the higher data rates (gigabit Ethernet) and greater flexibility of standard Ethernet. This has resulted in a TSN platform developed by Seven Solutions S.L. based on the commercially available Zynq-7000 devices from Xilinx. Thus, our design features a light-footprint field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture powered by a real-time executive for multiprocessor systems (RTEMS) operating system, which is currently pending its certification from the European space agency (ESA) for space applications. All these elements have been successfully integrated and validated for the avionics of the Miura 1 sounding rocket, which represents an illustrative case that verifies their applicability to similar scenarios. © 1965-2011 IEEE.This work was supported in part by the Amiga-7 under Grant RTI2018-096 228-B-C3 and it was conducted in the context of the Gigabit Ethernet TSN Deterministic Network (GETDEN) Project of the European Space Agency.With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709.Peer reviewe

High-speed data processing onboard sunrise chromospheric infrared spectropolarimeter for the SUNRISE III balloon telescope

Full list of authors: Kubo, Masahito; Katsukawa, Yukio; Hernández Expósito, David; Sánchez Gómez, Antonio; Balaguer Jimenéz, María.; Orozco Suárez, David; Morales Fernández, José M.; Aparicio del Moral, Beatriz; Moreno Mantas, Antonio J.; Bailón Martínez, Eduardo; del Toro Iniesta, Jose Carlos; Kawabata, Yusuke; Quintero Noda, Carlos; Oba, Takayoshi; Ishikawa, Ryohtaroh T.; Shimizu, ToshifumiThe Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectroPolarimeter (SCIP) has been developed for the third flight of the Sunrise balloon-borne stratospheric solar observatory. The aim of the SCIP is to reveal the evolution of three-dimensional magnetic fields in the solar photosphere and chromosphere using spectropolarimetric measurements with a polarimetric precision of 0.03% (1σ). Multiple lines in the 770 and 850 nm wavelength bands are simultaneously observed with two 2 k × 2 k CMOS cameras at a frame rate of 31.25 Hz. Stokes profiles are calculated onboard by accumulating the images modulated by a polarization modulation unit, and then compression processes are applied to the two-dimensional maps of the Stokes profiles. This onboard data processing effectively reduces the data rate. SCIP electronics can handle large data formats at high speed. Before the implementation into the flight SCIP electronics, a performance verification of the onboard data processing was performed with synthetic SCIP data that were produced with a numerical simulation modeling the solar atmospheres. Finally, we verified that the high-speed onboard data processing was realized on ground with the flight hardware using images illuminated by natural sunlight or an LED light.SUNRISE III is supported by funding from the Max Planck Foundation, NASA (Grant No. 80NSSC18K0934), Spanish FEDER/AEI/MCIU (Grant No. RTI2018-096886-C5) and a "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award to IAA-CSIC (Grant No. SEV-2017-0709), and the ISAS/JAXA Small Mission-of -Opportunity program and JSPS KAKENHI (Grant No. JP18H05234), and NAOJ Research Coordination Committee, NIN

Reconfigurable accelerator on FPGA for scientific computing: from a space-borne instrument to a high-performance computing data center: work-in-progress

We present a scientific computing accelerator on FPGA that uses hundreds of processors working in parallel organized in several SIMD cores. The accelerator is installed within an Ethernet network and acts as a high-performance computing server. A prototype is presented for processing solar images and achieves a great performance that can compete with a cluster. © 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, through Projects No.ESP2016-77548-C5-1-R and RTI2018-096886-B-C51, including a percentage from European FEDER funds. Authors also acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the >Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa> award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709