Optimized Design and Implementation of Digital Lock-In for Planetary Exploration Sensors

Optimized Design and Implementation of Digital Lock-In for Planetary Exploration Sensors

Exploring life conditions on the near-Earth planets and satellites before carrying out human missions is an important task for Space Agencies. For that purpose, scientific space missions usually include instruments to measure climatological variables. Within this space instrumentation and measuremen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE sensors journal Vol. 22; no. 23; p. 1
Main Authors: Ramirez Barcenas, A., Paz Herrera, R., Miranda Calero, J.A., Canabal Benito, M.F., Garcia Ares, E., Russu, A., Cortes, F.C., De Castro, A.J., Lopez, F., Portela-Garcia, M., Lopez Ongil, C.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01-12-2022
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Airborne sensing
Budgets
computing on-the-edge
Design optimization
Detectors
Digital Lock-In Amplifier
Dust
dust particles
Electric fields
Extraterrestrial measurements
Field programmable gate arrays
FPGA
Infrared lasers
Instruments
Ionizing radiation
IR Sensors
Mars
Mars Exploration
Mars missions
Mars surface
Maximum power
Noise measurement
Power consumption
Power management
Sensors
Signal to noise ratio
Space exploration
Space missions
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Summary:Exploring life conditions on the near-Earth planets and satellites before carrying out human missions is an important task for Space Agencies. For that purpose, scientific space missions usually include instruments to measure climatological variables. Within this space instrumentation and measurement context, dust sensors aim to measure dust particles in suspension, and provide valuable information for persons and equipment life conditions while they must deal with low signal-noise ratios (SNR). For example, Exomars mission is focused to characterize the weather on Mars surface and include up to four dust sensors, based on different technologies: infrared (IR), laser, interferometry, impact sensors and electric fields activity sensors. Due to the tight budget in terms of area, weight, power consumption and data budget in aerospace instruments, as well as ionizing radiation and extreme temperatures, current solutions present low scalability and configurability. In this paper, a novel system proposal that extracts valuable information from noisy signals obtained from InfraRed sensors aimed to measure airborne dust is presented. The solution provides competitive capabilities in terms of power consumption, data budget, SNR, and reconfigurability. It has been implemented in a rad-hard Microsemi® FPGA (RT54SX32S). Therefore, robustness and scalability are guaranteed. The results reported a maximum power consumption of up to 141 mA (@12Vdc), a sensitivity of 19.5 mV (input signal) and a data budget of 32B/s. This research possesses great potential to further instruments not only in planetary exploration but also at Earth applications.
ISSN:1530-437X
1558-1748
DOI:10.1109/JSEN.2022.3213423