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I am eagerly awaiting probe manufacturers learning anything at all from Ingenuity.


The Ingenuity is a really interesting project with some important lessons for spaceflight with unhardened CotS parts. However, I would argue that it and the Europa Clipper are two very different designs for two very different environments.

While mars is an elevated radiation environment when compared with earth, the Jovian radiation belts are on a whole other level, particles up to 1-2000 MeV are fairly common. To put that into context, a medical radiation beam therapy deals with 2-300 MeV on the absolute highest end. To get into the 1-2000 MeV range you generally are talking about energies found in the low end of particle accelerators. Ingenuity mostly had to worry about Total Lifetime Dose (TLD), one example of a TLD issue is dopant migration induced by high-energy heavy ion collisions which can change the on voltage of a transistor. At high energies you can have single events with enough energy to cause fatal latch-ups. For instance modern rad-hard FPGAs start encountering major issues around 60-70 MeV.

Furthermore, these parts are power MOSFETs which control power for whole subsystems so their reliability is critical to the operation of the spacecraft. In addition, the biggest issue here is not just that there were issues that were addressed and fixed, it's that Infineon didn't issue an errata to the datasheet or inform NASA of the issue. As a result there are now transistors littered throughout the spacecraft which don't meet the radiation needs. This is going to require reworking the boards, re-validation of the subsystem, and re-integration of the subsystem into the spacecraft. This all comes at a non-trivial impact to budget and timelines which is to say nothing about what this does to the launch window the project was trying to hit for gravity assist / proximity.

I hope you find this informative! :)

EDITS: Spelling and an "is"


Are you referring to off the shelf components used for the helicopter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_%28helicopter%29?wpr... (in case anyone wanted to refresh their memory)




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