Martian dust devils detector over FPGA

Abstract

Digital applications that must be on-board space missions must comply with a very restrictive set of requirements. These include energy efficiency, small volume and weight, robustness and high performance. Moreover, these circuits cannot be repaired in case of error, so they must be reliable or provide some way to recover from errors. These features make reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays) a very suitable technology to be used in space missions. This paper presents a Martian dust devil detector implemented on an FPGA. The results show that a hardware implementation of the algorithm presents very good numbers in terms of performance compared with the software version. Moreover, as the amount of time needed to perform all the computations on the reconfigurable hardware is small, this hardware can be used most of the time to realize other applications.