Onboard Data Processing for the AFIS Satellite Mission

by Peter Hinderberger (TUM)

Thursday 6 Feb 2025, 09:30 → 10:30 Europe/Berlin

E18/ENE Seminar Room 3268 (TUM PH)

The Earth's magnetic field traps charged particles in the Van Allen radiation belts. We intend to measure the flux of trapped antiprotons with energies of tens to hundreds of MeV using a satellite-based tracking calorimeter made from scintillating plastic fibers. The compact platform, high expected event rate, and low signal-to-background ratio require high-throughput onboard processing to reduce the amount of data that is sent to the ground. This is implemented as a pipelined multi-stage filter and compression chain on a high-performance FPGA.

I present the motivation, current status, and short-term plans of this processing approach and the firmware.