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

Abstract

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 (DSs) aim to measure dust particles in suspension and provide valuable information for persons and equipment life conditions, while they must deal with low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). For example, the Exomars mission is focused to characterize the weather on Mars surface and include up to four DSs based on different technologies: infrared (IR), laser, interferometry, impact sensors, and electric field 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 article, a novel system proposal that extracts valuable information from noisy signals obtained from IR 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 field programmable gate array (FPGA) (RT54SX32S). Therefore, robustness and scalability are guaranteed. The results reported a maximum power consumption of up to 141 mA (@12 Vdc), a sensitivity of 19.5 mV (input signal), and a data budget of 32 B/s. This research possesses great potential to further instruments not only in planetary exploration but also at Earth applications. Index Terms-Computing on-the-edge, digital lock-in (LI) amplifier, dust particles, field programmable gate array (FPGA), infrared (IR) sensors, Mars exploration. I. INTRODUCTIONS PACE exploration has always been a challenge for humanity and science. In 1957, the launch of the artificial Manuscript

Calibration of a Dust Scattering Instrument Using Tomographic Techniques and Its Application to a Dust Sensor Instrument

“…To avoid interference from external light sources, the thermoresistive membrane source is modulated and paired with a lock-in amplifier, as detailed in [21]. This causes a change in the spectral signature of the source, which is taken into account in [22].…”

Design and Implementation of Portable Physical Health Indicators Based on FPGA

“…The design of physical health indicators is an important means of controlling and improving the overall health level of the people. Therefore, achieving comprehensive, scientific, and reasonable standards for physical health indicators is of great significance for improving the overall health level of the people and improving social structure [1][2]. For the portability of FPGA, the standard for physical health indicators should include objective indicators of health status, such as blood pressure, blood sugar, blood composition, etc., as well as subjective indicators, such as physical activity ability, health status, etc.…”