A Highly-Efficient, Adaptive and Fault-Tolerant SoC Implementation of a Fourier Transform Spectrometer Data Processing

We present here one of the first research efforts conducted at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to implement on a single chip (Xilinx Zynq) all the functionality necessary to control a NASA instrument, namely a Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) that is proposed for deployment on future missions to Jupiter's moon Europa. The system requires custom logic to process the data delivered by the instrument, and software, to perform floating-point operations and to drive the interface with the main spacecraft computer. Three features are central in our SoC FTS implementation: (1) Efficiency, as the system achieves a high data processing throughput at relatively low power consumption, (2) Adaptivity, as the system can be configured from Earth based on the data observed while exploring a priori unknown space environments and (3) Fault-Tolerance, as the system needs to operate in the harsh radiation Jupiter magnetosphere where Europa orbits.