HighPerformance Visual Monitoring System For ...

Recent advances in space system design have led to increasingly complex spacecraft and mission objectives, and hence, both telemetry and visual data are important for monitoring such systems for space activities. The Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun (IKAROS) spacecraft was launched on May 21, 2010; with the mission to evaluate the performance of solar power sails which are large membranes that utilize sunlight for propulsion. The visual monitoring system for IKAROS must be small, low-cost, and intelligent. For this purpose, a very small, high-performance image processing unit (HP-IMAP) has been developed based on commercial off-the-shelf technologies. This unit has a calculation capability of 500 million instructions per second in a single 50 mm×50 mm printed circuit board, and incorporates various types of interfaces using field-programmable gate array technology. This visual monitoring system was launched with IKAROS and has successfully supported IKAROS operations. Using HP-IMAP, we have successfully achieved the world’s first images taken by a spacecraft itself. In this paper, the outline of HP-IMAP for IKAROS has been depicted and the results obtained have been presented using this system on IKAROS.