Atoms?
Any Intel Atom processors there in need of replacement?
All kidding aside deep space probe teams have consistently scraped every last bit of data out of balky hardware. Congratulations for rescuing the mission and getting good data JAXA.
The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) has said it is shutting down two of the five cameras on its planetary probe around Venus due to power glitches. The Akatsuki craft has been in orbit around the acid-death world since 2015, five years after it was due to get there. The satellite's main engine failed mid-flight and it took …
I tend to think that the 1 year lifetime is to allow for really pessimistic dependability/reliability analysis. Also you look good when it lasts much longer than expected. If you sell it as a 10 year mission, but only make it to 8, you look like a failure.
JAXA have managed to get a sophisticated piece of equipment up and out of our atmosphere n gravity well and propel it a bloody long way through an inhospitable environment to another planet. They've managed to overcome serious challenges, the like of which us mere terrestrial Engineers never have to worry about.
Good skills JAXA, damn good engineering and damn good science will result.
I think part of the problem was the path it took to get there. It had a "missed approach", had to go around the sun or something... well that exposed it to Mr. Sun's nuclear blast furnace and thereby did potential damage to metal oxide insulators and whatnot. yeah.
Apparently the Japanese are using the approach of sending out more cheaper probes than fewer more expensive ones. So they may have some failed ones, but that's not as big of an issue.
It's of course noteworthy that such power glitches are nothing uncommon. Stray charged particles are common up there and can cause parasitic thyristors to fire, leading to a short circuit. Electronics for space is designed to detect that, remove the power for a bit, and turn it on again.
There's nothing in electronics more rad-hard than a JANTXV TO-5 outline relay. As I discovered when designing a circuit that needed to recover from a parasitic thyristor trigger event.
There was also the time when we needed an actual, low power, low sensitivity thyristor for a circuit that had to function near a lightning simulator. We found one in a US catalog, expensive but still worth it as you don't want your dump circuit being prematurely triggered (ooh err miss...) and this was the easiest way to do it that avoided fibre optics. So we placed an order....
Only to get calls, first from the US Embassy and then from an applications engineer. Because the thyristors we wanted were the cheap version of the ones you use to trigger nuclear weapons.
Yeah, but they're now telling me too design out the TO-5 relays. There have been a number of other, erm, happenings, so someone is going off them.
As for crazy phone calls about why you want to use an LM139 compartor designed in 1960, who are you? and list every single person who will work on it, and every address the unit will ever be at, and...
Yes that would be the sort of environment that would be close to a nuclear weapon.
Although Cryotrons are more like valves than power semiconductors.
IIRC when such stuff is needed it's SOP to use cheap grade FO links and low power design tricks to run the thing as a floating ground. Horowitz & Hill "The Art of Electronics" is the usual reference for this stuff.
"Yes that would be the sort of environment that would be close to a nuclear weapon."
being tolerant of constant irradiation by a neutron source? well, lightning isn't neutrons, just high energy EMP. I wouldn't be surprised that hardening against both of them uses similar tech.
"IIRC when such stuff is needed it's SOP to use cheap grade FO links"
It is now, but when the project I referred to started, they were very expensive. People tend to forget (or not be old enough to know) how much the price of electronics has come down. Or how much lower power consumption is these days.
Well H&H has been around since at least the mid 80's.I guess it would depend on what exactly you wanted to do, wheather it's data transfer for monitoring and analysis or if you're trying to drive something. Another classic was side stepping the need for a full ADC for a parameter and driving a Voltage/Frequency converter so an analogue signal shows up as a "drift" in the flashing rate.
Driving stuff with short high power pulses remains quite tricky even today, especially in the sub ns range.