Paper 13093-248
The on-board scientific software of the HERMES missions
Abstract
The Technological and Scientific Pathfinders of the High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites (HERMES) are a constellation of low Earth orbit (LEO) novel CubeSats devoted to the monitoring of high energy sky. These 3U nanosatellites are equipped with miniaturized detectors specifically crafted for detecting bright high-energy transients, such as Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). Their primary objective is to advance Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) science and improve the identification of Gravitational Wave (GW) electromagnetic counterparts. The overall localization performance of the constellation is directly related to the number of components and inversely proportional to the average baseline between them, therefore it is expected to improve with each new unit starting operation. This paper presents the design of the onboard scientific software that runs on the Payload Data Handling Unit (PDHU) on-board the HERMES missions. Besides serving as the main interface between the payload and the satellite bus, the PDHU manages the on-board control, monitoring and data acquisition of the HERMES detectors. This monitoring will emit a “trigger” alert when a transient is present in the data. In this work, we discuss the on-board data processing, particularly the trigger-performance. We showcase some results using flight hardware and software, albeit in a laboratory environment, and compare these results with simulated data.
Presenter
Alejandro Guzmán Cabrera
Eberhard Karls Univ. Tübingen (Germany)
Dr. Alejandro Guzman Cabrera was born in Mexico City where he attended the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). He got his undergrad degree at UNAM where he worked in the Pierre Auger Collaboration, then continued to get his PhD in Tuebingen, Germany in further cosmic ray research with the JEM-EUSO mission. After getting his PhD he has continued his research shifting to X-ray astronomy. He has worked in mission such as XIPE, eXTP, ATHENA, and THESEUS. Since 2018 he has been working full time in the HERMES pathfinder missions and the HERMES detector flying on the SpIRIT mission. He has since started a working in a group in the University of Tübingen focusing on Nanosatellites.