One small photo for man…
08 September 2009
Actel has extended its congratulations to the NASA LRO and LCROSS teams for its images of the moon from the LROC.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has successfully returned the images, and it is Actel's radiation-tolerant RTAX-S FPGAs that are aboard and performing critical functions for the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) and LCROSS (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) spacecrafts, which will return more data about the moon than any previous mission.
Both missions are critical parts of NASA's investigations to prepare and support future human exploration to the moon, gathering crucial data on the lunar environment that will help astronauts prepare for long-duration lunar expeditions.
The LRO mission represents the first documented space-flight heritage of Actel's high-density 624pin Ceramic Column Grid Array (CCGA) package, while LCROSS has been preceded by no fewer than seven other missions that are using Actel's RTAX-S space flight FPGAs in conventional Ceramic Quad Flat-Pack (CQFP) packaging. Actel RTAX-S space-flight FPGAs have the performance, capacity and radiation tolerance required to reliably and successfully perform critical tasks on key scientific, commercial and military space missions.
The Actel RTAX-S FPGA family consists of devices ranging in density from 250,000 to four million equivalent system gates. The family, which includes the RTAX2000S FPGAs used in the LRO mission, offers features desirable for space-flight applications, including single-event upset (SEU)-hardened flip-flops, usable error-corrected on-board memory and a large number of user I/O. These features, in combination with the inherent single-chip and instant operation benefits of Actel's nonvolatile products, give designers the ability to minimise power consumption, reduce component count and save board space and weight while meeting their density, performance and radiation-resistance requirements.
Over the last decade, Actel FPGAs have been onboard more than 100 launches and flown on over 300 satellites and spacecrafts.
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