The Particle Processing Unit (PPU-M) on-board the Plasma Observatory Mother Spacecraft

Plasma Observatory (PMO) is a candidate for the ESA Directorate of Science M7 mission call, currently in Phase A. It is a multi-scale mission concept with the capability to resolve scale coupling and non-planarity/non-stationarity in plasma energization and energy transport.

On board the mothercraft, the Particle Processing Unit (PPU-M) will be the single interface between the spacecraft and all the particle instruments: the Electron Particle Chamber (EPC-M), the Ion Mass Spectrometer (IMS) and the Energetic Particle Experiment (EPE-M). The PPU-M provides a single power, telemetry, and control interface to the spacecraft as well as power switching, commanding and data handling for the particle instruments. The PPU-M will have a fully redundant configuration, with two CPU boards (nominal and redundant), based on the dual-core LEON3FT processor and two groups of 3 Compression and Scientific Processing (CSP) boards based on FPGAs.

The approach of a common data processing unit for all the particle instruments allows to efficiently handle the data rate from all the particle instruments and the data processing on board, also facilitating interoperation with the other instruments on the spacecraft. Moreover, it allows technical and programmatic synergies giving the possibility to optimize and save spacecraft resources. Here, we will describe the PPU-M characteristics and functionalities.