Influence of Spacecraft Shielding Structures on Galactic Cosmic Ray-Induced Soft Error Rate

Through the use of the Geant4 Radiation Analysis for Space (GRAS) Monte Carlo tool, we present new results on the impact of different space habitat shell compositions on on-board electronics Soft Error Rate (SER) induced by Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR). The comparison with the aluminum-equivalent approach is performed using the standard CREME96 tool on a heterogeneous set of representative devices. In particular, the iron-ion spectrum has been taken as representative of the whole GCR spectrum due to its Linear Energy Transfer (LET), material penetration, and abundance characteristics. The results of this work show that the device soft error rate, calculated with the two approaches, in the particular case of human exploration habitats, can be overestimated or underestimated up to 50%, depending on the device type and shielding configuration especially when Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) components are used.