The Gamma-ray Module (GMOD) is an experiment designed for the detection of gamma-ray bursts in low Earth orbit as the principal scientific payload on a 2-U CubeSat, EIRSAT-1. GMOD comprises a cerium bromide scintillator coupled to silicon photomultipliers which are processed and digitised by a bespoke ASIC. Custom firmware on the GMOD motherboard has been designed, implemented and tested for the MSP430 microprocessor which manages the experiment including readout, storage and configuration of the system. The firmware has been verified in a series of experiments testing the response over a realistic range of input detector trigger frequencies from 50Hz to 1kHz for the primary time tagged event (TTE) data. The power consumption and ability of the firmware to successfully receive and transmit the packets to the on-board computer was investigated. The experiment demonstrated less than 1% loss of packets up to 1kHz for the standard transfer mode with the power not exceeding 31mW. The transfer performance and power consumption demonstrated are within the required range of this CubeSat instrument.
@article{arxiv.2111.03128,
title = {Embedded Firmware Development for a Novel CubeSat Gamma-Ray Detector},
author = {Joseph Mangan and David Murphy and Rachel Dunwoody and Maeve Doyle and Alexey Ulyanov and Lorraine Hanlon and Brian Shortt and Sheila McBreen and Masoud Emam and Jessica Erkal and Joe Flanagan and Gianluca Fontanesi and Andrew Gloster and Conor O'Toole and Favour Okosun and Rakhi RajagopalanNair and Jack Reilly and Lána Salmon and Daire Sherwin and Joseph Thompson and Sarah Walsh and Daithí de Faoite and Mike Hibbett and Umair Javaid and Fergal Marshall and David McKeown and William O'Connor and Kenneth Stanton and Ronan Wall},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.03128},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
9 pages, 5 figures. This paper was presented at the 8th IEEE International Conference on Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology, July 26-30, 2021, and will appear in the conference proceedings. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for publication