On-Orbit Flight Results from the Reconfigurable Cibola Flight Experiment Satellite (CFESat)

The Cibola Flight Experiment (CFE) is an experimental small satellite developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to demonstrate the feasibility of using FPGA-based reconfigurable computing for sensor processing in a space environment. The CFE satellite was launched on March 8, 2007 in low-earth orbit and has operated extremely well since its deployment. The nine Xilinx Virtex FPGAs used in the payload have been used for several high-throughput sensor processing applications and for single-event upset (SEU) monitoring and mitigation. This paper will describe the CFE system and summarize its operational results. In addition, this paper will describe the results from several SEU detection circuits that were performed on the spacecraft.