Client
AMOS / ESA
Project
ELOIS is a is a compact hyperspectral imager for Earth Observation with Large swath (70 km), High radiometric performance (SNR max > 400) and with up to 210 spectral bands covering the 400-2450 nm range.
The main targeted markets and applications are commercial or institutional missions with operational purposes in the following fields: geology, agriculture, vegetation science, biodiversity, urban planning, coastal waters, environmental degradation and hazards, snow cover, forestry.
Thanks to the financial support of the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), this co-funded project will deliver the payload to be integrated on an InnoSat platform by OHB Sweden for a launch in 2025. ELOIS project hs indeed been selected for an In Orbit Demonstration mission as part of the EU Horizon 2020 IOD/IOV Initiative.
Challenge(s)
DELTATEC is responsible for the design and procurement of the payload computer PLC as part of the ELOIS project. The payload computer provides dual payloads data acquisition and local recording system. The PLC must provide capabilities such as time-programable acquisition start for precise control of first frame timestamp, simultaneously acquisition operations from both payloads, acquired data are recorded uncompressed and time-stamped in real-time to the internal mass memory.
The download process must be able to select a range of recorded data from mass-memory and push them to one of the 2 downlink SpaceWire interfaces.
The PLC must also provide Hyperspectral on-the-fly compression using CCSDS-123.0-B-1 lossless algorithm which can offer up to 2x compression ratio.
Solution
The electronics are designed using Hybrid architecture (Cots + hardened components) allowing high end processing while keeping high reliability and being cost affordable.
THE PLC is proposed in a single box offering cold electronic board redundancy.
Each unit is offering processing part using defense-grade Xilinx Zync-7045 family (SoC with Dual Core ARM Cortex-A9 and Kintex-7 FPGA), supervision part using radiation hardened processor. In terms of memory the PLC proposes 3 Gbits of DDR3 memory with integrated ECC for data processing, 256Mb Flash with Rad-Tolerant technology from 3DPlus for non-volatile storage of run-time journal, 512Mb Flash with Rad-Tolerant technology from 3DPlus for storage of processing unit firmware and 1TBytes (or more) for mass memory storage based on Rad-Tolerant Technology memory cells (SLC technology).
All the technical characteristics of the PLC (Size, Mass, interface, power) would be found here (link to product sheet)