Speaker
Description
ESA’s Vigil mission is an operational mission planned to monitor the solar drivers of space weather conditions from the Lagrange point L5. The Photospheric Magnetic field Imager (PMI) on this mission shall provide full-disk vector magnetograms of the solar photosphere at a cadence of 30 minutes with 20-minute latency for its priority-1 data products. In addition, raw filtergrams and high-cadence line-of-sight magnetograms and Dopplergrams at a cadence up to 1 minute will be provided as supplementary data products. To meet the real-time processing requirements imposed by the telemetry volume, onboard pipelines are implemented in the processing unit hardware to produce low latency data products. In order to handle this computationally heavy task while meeting the latency requirement of the mission, the pipelines are implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This paper describes the series of steps involved in the first part of onboard data processing – from image acquisition and accumulation to polarimetric demodulation. It also discusses the parallel processing of the three pipelines in a resource-constrained FPGA in order to obtain a real-time processing environment which complies with PMI’s stringent requirements on accuracy, stability and reliability with the limited resources available on a deep space mission.
