Martian dust devils detector over FPGA

Abstract

Abstract. Digital applications that must be on-board space missions must comply with a very restrictive set of requirements. These include energy efficiency, small volume and weight, robustness and high performance. Moreover, these circuits cannot be repaired in case of error, so they must be reliable or provide some way to recover from errors. These features make reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays) a very suitable technology to be used in space missions. This paper presents a Martian dust devil detector implemented on an FPGA. The results show that a hardware implementation of the algorithm presents very good numbers in terms of performance compared with the software version. Moreover, as the amount of time needed to perform all the computations on the reconfigurable hardware is small, this hardware can be used most of the time to realize other applications.

About Some Possible Implementations of the Fractional Calculus

“…In the context of the spatial exploration, other new original application of the fractional calculus analysis is the prediction and identification of dust devils and correlations between wind and seismic signals in a Martian meteorological payload packet. We recently started this project on the basis of our previous experience in the missions to Mars and to apply in ExoMars22 (initially ExoMars20 but now delayed due to the Covid-19) [37][38][39][40].…”

Non-commutative tomography and signal processing

“…There have been several efforts to develop systematic methods to detect the effect of dust devils on the Martian atmosphere data. They are based either on checking several ad hoc conditions in the data [33] or on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) [34].…”

Signal recognition and adapted filtering by non‐commutative tomography

“…and using (36) one concludes that the required sequence X n is the one listed in (29), where X 0 is freely chosen (in general we take X 0 = 0). We then consider the projections of the signal f(t) on this set of…”

“…There has been several efforts to develop systematic methods to detect the effect of dust devils on the martian atmosphere data. They are based either on checking several ad-hoc conditions in the data [27] or on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) [28].…”