Geolocation of Swarm Processor Module radiation errors

An ESA and Airbus team studied a decade of radiation errors on susceptible elements of Swarm's onboard computer. These included the Processor Module SRAM (PM-RAM), the CPU's working memory. This graph shows the geolocation of the PM-RAM errors at the time of detection (top) and statistical mapping of the PM-RAM errors by summing all orbital points in the 34 min (scrubbing) prior to error detection. In both cases, the 1D histogram (in black) represents the longitudinal distribution of the errors. Both plots are the sum of errors for the three satellites.