LabOSat, a customizable instrumentation board for hazardous environments: performance under neutron radiation

M. BARELLA; J. LIPOVETZKY; J. LONGHINO; G. SANCA; F. G. MARLASCA; G. RODRÍGUEZ; D. MARTELLITI; P. LEVY; F. GOLMAR

C.A.B.A.

Simposio; 1st IAA Latin American Symposium on Small Satellites; 2017

LabOSat is an electronic board platform aimed to work at hazardous environments, with the mainobjective of performing the testing and validation of both custom and commercial devices [1].The first version of LabOSat is presently being tested on board of a small satellite at a Low Earth Orbit(BugSat-1 satellite manufactured by Satellogic) since May-2014, standing 426 rads at a 165 rad/yr rate asrecorded by solid state dosimeters. The system is still successfully working. Another two LabOSatplatforms were launched by June-2016 and are also providing data on their performance.In this work we describe further experiments in which the performance of LabOSat is tested underneutron radiation.The system was exposed to a constant flux of 100 rad/h of gamma radiation and 2.54x106 neutrons/s cm2thermal neutrons for 5 hours at the Neutron Imaging Facility Chamber, RA-6 Nuclear Research Reactorat CNEA (Bariloche, Argentina) while the reactor was operating at 500 kW. During the experiment, theplatform executed continuously standard routines comprising integrity checks of firmware andcommunication messages, temperature, addressing test of dosimetry module, measurements of supplyvoltage, as well as voltage and current sources for payload devices.After 5 hours at constant dose, no corruption of the Flash memory was observed. The Cyclic RedundancyComparison (CRC) check of the firmware was calculated 11 times, and no changes in the structure of thecode were observed. Also segments reserved for saving reports of the executed standard tests wereperiodically checked and showed no modifications [1].Performed measurements of supply voltage, and test of voltage and current sources were successfullyattained. Note that the total dose received by the board in this experiment is equivalent to a three-yearsspace mission at a Low Earth Orbit with shielding.LabOSat was next exposed to neutrons at the Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) Facility, RA-6Nuclear Research Reactor at CNEA (Bariloche, Argentina). During 5 hs 13 min the platform received atotal thermal neutrons fluence of 9.10x1012 neutrons/cm2at a flux of 4.80x108neutrons/s cm2 while onlinetesting was performed. After 2 hours irradiation, a failure was detected in two addressing circuits. Ulteriorneutron activation analysis of the LabOSat board revealed the presence of traces of active Br, Cu and Au.A thorough analysis and discussion of the steps leading to this failure will be presented.[1] "LabOSat: a low cost measurement platform designed for hazardous environments", M. Barella et al.,2016 Seventh Argentine Symposium and Conference on Embedded Systems (CASE), ISBN: 978-987-45523-9-6 E-Book: 978-987-46297-0-8 Printed IEEE CATALOG: CFP1646V-PRT IEEE XPLORE:CFP1646V-ART