Quantifying Radiation Storm Impacts on Interplanetary Missions (Radiation Storm Impacts)

The deleterious effects that solar energetic particles can have on spacecraft electronic systems constitute a significant concern for all space missions. This project aims to develop tools that are capable of computing space radiation effects on spacecraft components, particularly focusing on the effects of dynamic radiation storms due to Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs) on interplanetary missions. The tools will be valuable for making operational decisions for protection of our space assets. The capabilities developed will also have other applications in the design phase of spacecraft and for anomaly resolution.

Towards Quantifying Radiation Storm Impacts on Interplanetary Mission

The deleterious effects that solar energetic particles can have on spacecraft electronic systems constitute a significant concern for all space missions. This project aims to develop tools that are capable of computing space radiation effects on spacecraft components, particularly focusing on the effects of dynamic radiation storms due to Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs) on interplanetary missions. The tools will be valuable for making operational decisions for protection of our space assets. The capabilities developed will also have other applications in the design phase of spacecraft and for anomaly resolution.

The project leverages capabilities of two different directorates at Goddard to develop user-friendly tools that will provide quantitative assessment of radiation hazards, which are primary concerns of operation and wellbeing of NASA missions and humans in space. The game-changing tools/capability resulting from the project will be of tremendous value to current and future missions, and be beneficial for spacecraft anomaly resolution. the execution of the proposed project. Real-time streams of SEP measurements from GOES, STEREOs, ACE and others have already been available on iSWA. The flexible architecture/design of iSWA allows for easy ingestion of any new data streams. Even though deterministic long-term forecasting of SEP events remains elusive, CCMC, as the world leading modeling center, ensures state-of-the –art SEP modeling capability at the time is to be utilized.

The game-changing tools/capability resulting from the project will be of tremendous value to current and future missions, and be beneficial for spacecraft anomaly resolution. This would be used by mission operations as input for making decisions on whether systems and instrumentation should be shut down during an event. These decisions would be driven by the particular features and susceptibilities of each spacecraft and its payload. Due to the quantitative analysis of the operational environment the new tools will also be useful for anomaly reviews. Dose vs. shielding depth curves could easily be tracked in real time for evaluating how much total dose lifetime is left on electronic components.

The knowledge gained from this project will provide helpful and refined guidelines in future mission design regarding proper radiation hardening. These new operational tools will also support the design phase of spacecraft by making available previous dynamic aspects of the radiation environment to designers to improve the return of science data. For example, this could influence the implementation of reprogrammable devices, which can be designed to switch to more robust single event upset mitigation schemes during solar events, or help establish improved levels of shielding for modern devices.

The deleterious effects that radiation storms can have on spacecraft electronic systems constitute a significant concern for the commercial space industry as well.

The deleterious effects that radiation storms can have on spacecraft electronic systems constitute a significant concern for all government agencies that have space assets or rely on such assets for their primary mission goals.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.