🛰 Space Radiation Effects on Electronics – Part I
Understanding the Invisible Threat to Your CubeSat
In previous posts, we explored the space radiation environment. From the Van Allen belts to galactic cosmic rays, and why shielding yourself from Earth’s magnetic bubble changes everything.
Now we shift focus to one of the most mission-critical consequences of that environment: What radiation does to your electronics.
If you're designing a satellite, you already know mass, power, and volume are limited. But there's one more invisible enemy every engineer must face — space radiation-induced failures.
Let’s unpack how radiation affects spacecraft electronics, how these failures happen, and what it means for CubeSat missions.
🔍 Two Ways Radiation Damages Electronics
Space radiation affects electronic components through two broad mechanisms:
1. Cumulative Effects
These are slow, predictable degradations that accumulate over time. They don’t cause immediate failure but can lead to gradual performance loss or eventual device death.
đź’ˇ Total Ionizing Dose (TID)
Ionizing particles knock electrons loose and charge up insulating layers inside semiconductors. Over time, this charge build-up shifts threshold voltages, reduces gain, and increases leakage currents. Eventually, your component drifts out of spec, quietly.
📉 Symptoms:
Slower switching times
Increased power consumption
Unexpected resets or startup failures
🧊 Displacement Damage Dose (DDD)
High-energy particles displace atoms in the silicon lattice, creating defects. This affects carrier mobility and reduces gain in devices like photodiodes, solar cells, and bipolar transistors.
📉 Symptoms:
Drop in solar cell efficiency
Degraded sensor performance
Loss of signal amplification
These effects are cumulative, dosage-dependent, and almost predictable with testing and modeling tools like OMERE or SPENVIS.
2. Single-Event Effects (SEE)
Unlike cumulative effects, SEEs are instantaneous and result from a single high-energy particle interaction. They are unpredictable, potentially mission-ending, and require special design considerations.
Let’s walk through the most common types:
⚠️ Single Event Upset (SEU)
A particle strikes a memory cell, flipping a bit from 0 to 1 or vice versa.
🧠Example: A cosmic ray causes a CubeSat’s command to reverse — from “turn heater on” to “turn heater off.”
đź“Ś Usually non-destructive and can be corrected with error detection and correction (EDAC).
🔥 Single Event Latch-up (SEL)
A charged particle triggers a parasitic structure inside a CMOS device, creating a low-resistance path and resulting in a short circuit.
🧯 Often requires power cycling to recover — if you're lucky. If not? Your device overheats and dies.
🧊 Single Event Functional Interrupt (SEFI)
A particle disrupts a control circuit or a finite state machine, leading to a temporary malfunction — e.g., a processor freezes.
đź› Recovery typically involves a system reset.
đź’Ą Single Event Burnout (SEB)
A high-energy particle causes an uncontrollable current spike in a power device like a MOSFET, permanently damaging it.
đź’€ This is one of the most dangerous effects for power subsystems.
🧨 Single Event Gate Rupture (SEGR)
The particle physically damages the gate oxide in a transistor, breaking it forever.
đź’ˇ Unlike SEUs, SEBs and SEGRs are non-recoverable and often destructive.
🧬 The Difference in a Nutshell
🔧 Why This Matters for CubeSat Engineers
Whether you're a student building your first satellite or a startup pushing toward orbit, understanding radiation effects is essential to mission success.
CubeSats often use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics to save on cost and time. But COTS components aren’t built for radiation — at least not by default.
That’s why we need to test, model, and design systems with space radiation in mind. And that brings us to our next topic...
âŹď¸Ź What’s Next?
In Part II, we’ll walk through real-world case studies of radiation-induced failures — and what was done to prevent or recover from them. In the future we'll also explore Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA): The practical toolkit used by space engineers to make electronics radiation-tolerant without blowing the budget.
đź“š Further Reading
If you're eager to explore this before the next article drops, here are some great resources:
