The ESIC
flight software has been designed to meet the scientific requirements of the mission even
in limited transmission bit-rate allocation conditions. The intrinsic high data throughput
of the instrument, typically producing a data volume for the selected four ion species of
16 polar times 31 energies times 16 azimuths times 16bits sampling in one spin period
(1.5s), has been handled by a real time operating system to elaborate and compress data
into a few kbit/s telemetry streams output. The instrument will operate in the different
regions of the Earth magnetosphere encountered by Equator-S spacecraft in 16 operative
modes which for the 2 telemetry foreseen regimes gives an amount of 32 science data transmission schemes. These schemes correspond to a sequence of
products spanning from the momenta of the ions species to the 3D distributions. The
software could be quickly developed at IFSI thanks also to the good inheritance coming
from the CIS experiment flown on the unsuccessful Cluster mission kindly supported by the Berkeley Space Science Laboratory.
The heavy
on-board data handling of ESIC instrument necessary to adapt the measurements to the
characteristics of the widely variable environment , has required a long testing activity
to validate the calculations. A considerable amount of 3D simulations have been fed into
the instrument, to cross check the results of the on-board computations and the parallel
off-line workstation calculations.
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