A CubeSat design to validate the Virtex-5 FPGA for spaceborne image processing

The Earth Sciences Decadal Survey identifies a multiangle, multispectral, high-accuracy polarization imager as one requirement for the Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) mission. JPL has been developing a Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (MSPI) as a candidate to fill this need. A key technology development needed for MSPI is on-board signal processing to calculate polarimetry data as imaged by each of the 9 cameras forming the instrument. With funding from NASA's Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program, JPL is solving the real-time data processing requirements to demonstrate, for the first time, how signal data at 95 Mbytes/sec over 16-channels for each of the 9 multiangle cameras in the spaceborne instrument can be reduced on-board to 0.45 Mbytes/sec. This will produce the intensity and polarization data needed to characterize aerosol and cloud microphysical properties. Using the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA platform, a polarimetric processing least-squares fitting algorithm is under development to meet MSPI's on-board processing (OBP) requirements. The Virtex-5 FPGA is not yet space-flight qualified; however, an in-flight validation of this technology on a pre-cursor CubeSat mission is valuable toward advancing the technology readiness level for MSPI and the ACE mission.
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