Hey Uwe,
If Voyagers had FPGAs on them, they would work for hundreds of years more,
who knows what the lowest useful charge rate would be. Charge capacitor,
full, wake up for a while, sleep and, charge capacitor. Charge Rate
Dependent.
Imagine a stack of 60 Falcon 9 like Starlink Mirrors, sent on the fastest
route out to enlarger base leg of the sensor array (aperture), we could
image planets around the closest stars, increase resolution many orders of
magnitude.
On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 12:31 AM Uwe Klein <uwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Am 24.12.2019 um 05:54 schrieb Craig Fink:
On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 6:50 AM Uwe Klein <uwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
My last big project was MIRO/Rosetta. so Yes and not/less today. :-)
Could we reprogram the MIRO/Rosetta to gather more information?
No.
for the reason up front that the orbiter has been "landed" and
decommissioned.
The Wombles: don't litter :-)
in abstract terms because the PGA family used is Anti-Fuse.
i.e. nonvolatile and nonreprogrammable. ( why Xilinx RAM based parts
were not used.)
finally that design is not very flexible.
Where the hardware baseline for previous spectrometers
were "rappelwerk" and run by a loadable program code:
mostly switch on/off/trigger commands and single branch instruction.
MIRO ran from a set of counters controlling the measurement cycle.
( and was a 4 path 4 FPGA interleave design for speed with a central
control FPGA.)
My (terrestrial/aircraft flyable) baseline hardware using lattice ISPlsi
parts was more flexible.
Dual ADC ( 8Bit) frontend, a 16 by 16 bit wide RAM based table
adder/squarer ( table loadable. translation from input to output freely
choosable.)
a 16 bit input to 48 bit wide accumulator. VME or Parport interface for
access.
That was rather flexible.
up front the sequencing program, table data.
more involved changing the Firmware loaded into the lattice things.
other IO structure, trigger ( in, out) signals. ... )
I've used the same PCB for Chirptransform ( R/I HF input )
and Acousto optic spectronemter ( CCD control and readout ) front ends.
Uwe
