Up above the protection of the earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, satellites face a lot of radiation in space. A single cosmic ray hitting a satellite’s electronics can wreak havoc on an entire multi-million-dollar space mission, so it’s crucial to design and test radiation hardened electronics for spacecraft.
In the latest Megavolts Episode Dr Phil Dooley from The Australian National University (ANU) talks with Dr Jafar Shojaii from the Silicon Platform Lab at Macquarie University, who is working on this challenge. He brings his prototype chip designs to the ANU Space Irradiation Beamline and bombards them with a year or more’s worth of radiation, to check how they survive.
And it’s not just space equipment – electronics cop high radiation doses in medical physics environments, in defence applications, and in particle physics experiments like the Large Hadron Collider. Crucial work, keeping all these systems operational!
