Innovative miniaturization for low resource interplanetary exploration: Components, short paper

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched new research aiming at realizing low resource and frequent space science mission. We report the development activity for realizing miniaturization of onboard equipment using SpaceWire. The technology development target is the miniaturization of onboard units, which are small enough for deploying interplanetary mission with small rockets as Epsilon Launch Vehicles. Since SpaceWire interface consists of full digital circuitries and its communication protocol enables hardware implementation, Large Scale Integration (LSI) technology, surface mounting technology (SMT), and ceramic ball grid array (CBGA) packages are exploited for the miniaturization of onboard equipment with communication interfaces. The preliminary result shows that one half and/or one third in scale and mass can be realized.