On-board Data Processing for the AFIS Satellite Mission

by Peter Hinderberger (TUM Physics E18)

Thursday 22 Jan 2026, 09:30 → 10:30 Europe/Berlin

E18/ENE Seminar Room 3268 (TUM PH)

Antiproton Flux in Space (AFIS) is a satellite-based mission concept to measure the antiproton flux in the Earth’s lower Van Allen radiation belt in an energy range between 20 and 100 MeV.
The  detector will be launched on a compact platform with strong limitations  to power, data storage, and data transmission, such as a CubeSat. AFIS will perform its measurements in  the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), a region where we encounter a large  flux of background protons.  Due to the limitations of the platform,  this background must be reduced and compressed before transmission to the ground. For data acquisition, event building,  processing, and transmission to the communication module, we use a radiation-tolerant Kintex UltraScale FPGA. I present the three-layered  filter and compression framework, provide a brief physics-based analysis of the employed algorithms and cuts, and discuss  the achieved rejection ratios.