Abstract
CUBES is a X-ray detector payload which will be installed on the KTH 3U CubeSat mission, MIST.The detector comprises cerium-doped Gd3Al2Ga3O12 (GAGG) scintillators read out with silicon photomultipliers through a Citiroc Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. The detector operates in the energy range∼35–800 keV. The aim of the CUBES mission is to provide experience in the operation of these relatively new technologies in a high-inclination low earth orbit, thereby providing confidence for component selection in more complex satellite missions. The design of the CUBES detector is described, and results from performance characterisation tests carried out on a prototype of CUBES, called Proto-CUBES, are reported. Proto-CUBES was flown on a stratospheric balloon platform from Timmins, Canada, in August 2019. During the ∼12 hour long flight, the performance of Proto-CUBES was studied in the near-space environment. As well as measuring the X-ray counts spectra at different atmospheric depths, a 511 keV line from positron annihilation was observed.
Highlights
: CUBES is a X-ray detector payload which will be installed on the KTH 3U CubeSat mission, MIST
Data from CUBES are expected to be useful when interpreting results obtained by another MIST payload, SEUD (Single-Effect Upset Detector) [12], which aims to study mitigation methods for in-orbit single event upset rate in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)
We present the design details of CUBES and the results obtained from characterisation studies and balloon flight of the Proto-CUBES instrument
Summary
The bias voltage is provided by a programmable “high-voltage” power supply (HVPS) module, the C11204-02, from Hamamatsu Photonics This device can provide the very stable voltage needed by the APDs (on the order of tens of μV) and it has built-in programmable temperature compensation, which is useful for compensating temperature-induced gain variations in the MPPCs. HVPS: MPPC: OBC: SoC: High-Voltage Power Supply Multi-Pixel Photon Counter On-Board Computer System-on-Chip. To characterise the radiation environment around the satellite, the data acquisition (DAQ) system implemented in the FPGA of the CUBES SoC collects pulse-height spectra from each of the scintillator detectors. The header contains “housekeeping” data such as DAQ run time, instrument live time, temperature, MPPC bias voltage and current drawn by the MPPC – a key indicator of. CUBES stores 24832 bytes of data to its memory during one DAQ run
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