Radiation poses a major threat to satellites. Galactic cosmic rays, solar flares and particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetosphere can have severe consequences on a satellite’s integrity, as the high energies associated with them can damage or even destroy its electronic components. CERN faces similar problems inside the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) tunnels and has developed radiation monitoring devices to prevent radiation damage to electronics.

Space RadMon is a miniaturized version of the LHC’s well-proven radiation monitoring device [1]. This reliable low-cost, low-power, and low-mass instrument for radiation monitoring in space are entirely based on standardized, commercial-off-the-shelf components, selected, and calibrated at CERN. 

The system is modular, consisting of a motherboard and a sensor board. The modularity of the system provides great flexibility, allowing the sensor board to be exchanged for a mission-specific version. The basic sensor board is capable of detecting radiation effects such as total ionising dose, upsets (HeH fluence) and latchups.Space RadMon is the ideal.instrument to measure real-time radiation effects such as total ionizing dose, upsets and latchups.

An improved, more precise and more flexible version of the instrument, the Space RadMon-NG, capable of unprecedented sensitivity to low-energy protons has been also developed and will be used in several missions.

References:

[1] G. Spiezia et al., “A new Radmon version for the LHC and its injection lines,” IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 3424–3431, Dec. 2014, doi: 10.1109/TNS.2014.2365046.

[2] https://kt.cern/aerospace/spaceradmon