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In order to maximize system mass and cost savings, a Hall Effect Thruster Direct Drive Approach shall ideally get away with the need to provide galvanic isolation for the Anode voltage. In this respect, we present some experimental data aiming at characterising the implications of a direct connection between the HET Cathode Return Potential and the Spacecraft Ground.

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METIS is a visible and UV externally inversely occulted coronagraph selected to fly aboard the Solar Orbiter space mission. Thanks to its own capabilities and exploiting the peculiar opportunities offered by the SO mission profile, the instrument will address some of the still open issues in understanding the physics driving the observed processes in the corona and characterizing the slow and fast components of the solar wind. Recently the METIS design went thorough a significant revision involving the overall electronics configuration and software functionalities, comprehensive of descoping of some features but also aiming at the improvement of the instrument’s reliability. As a result the electronics architecture has been simplified enabling an effective cold-strapped redundancy scheme of some subsystems, while the preliminary SW database has been defined as well. We also identified the scientific processing algorithms implementing the instrument functionalities and the imagecompression capabilities able to match the selected HW resources providing an optimal compromise between complexity and compression ratio. This paper describes the revised electronics and software design developed in order to maximize the overall scientific returns with the updated instrument configuration approaching the Phases C/D of the project