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.