ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on hazards present for devices and integrated circuits in the near-earth orbital radiation environment. There are a number of environmental hazards that spacecraft must be designed for, which include low-energy plasma, particle radiation, neutral gas particles, ultraviolet and x-ray radiation, micrometeoroids, and orbital debris. Radiation effects that are important to consider for spacecraft and instrument design traditionally have been grouped into three categories: degradation from total ionizing dose, degradation from displacement damage, and single-event effects (SEE). SEE are the main radiation effects caused by galactic cosmic rays in microelectronics and photonics. The metric traditionally used to describe heavy ion–induced SEE is linear energy transfer. A dynamic model of the radiation belts would need to account for the competing source and loss mechanisms for trapped particles. Dynamic models of the radiation belts that account for the physical processes have been under development at ONERA using the Salammbo codes.
