Radiation Monitor Extension for CMOS Imaging Instruments in Nanosatellites

With a software-based approach using commercial off-the-shelf CMOS imaging sensors to detect ionizing particles, a low-cost radiation monitor is published to improve fault tolerance of nanosatellites with commodity hardware. We achieve this by segmenting image artifacts caused by radiation effects simultaneously within the original capturing images. For this purpose, a two-step segmentation method was developed using already acquired images from a miniaturized limb sounding spectrometer that derives atmospheric temperature profiles. The method covers bad pixel elimination and particle flux determination by a minimalized amount of additional computational costs. This allows the determination of the radiation environment close to the imaging instruments inside the satellite. We present the segmented results and compare it with simulated as well as measured data from a reference radiation monitor experiment. The detected particle flux is up to a factor of five lower than the simulated flux. These effective particle flux values will be used to improve measurement time by triggering mitigation measures on demand and expand their life time.