Chimera experiment

ESA’s GomX-4B CubeSat is carrying this small, cheap but important secondary experiment: a single 10x10cm electronics board with 12 separate computer flash memories, made up of three examples of four different types, each purchased for a few euros. Known as Chimera – short for Cubesat Highly Integrated Memory Radiation Assurance – this experiment will test how such ‘commercial-off-the-shelf’ (COTS) parts cope with bombardments of high-energy electrically charged atomic particles from the Sun and deep space. A specially space-qualified monitoring chip, seen in gold, will record the performance of the dozen memories.