Satellites are integrated and require thousands of electronic devices to be crammed into a limited space: high-power transmitters, extremely sensitive signal receivers, high-speed computers, various motors, gyroscopes, solar wing drive mechanisms… They are connected through dense cables. The main purpose of EMC testing is to ensure that all electronic and electrical equipment can operate normally as designed in a common electromagnetic environment and will not be adversely affected by the electromagnetic environment generated by other equipment. As the complexity and density of electronic equipment used on spacecraft increases, electromagnetic compatibility issues between equipment increase, and the importance of electromagnetic compatibility testing also increases.<\/p>\n
In satellite environmental testing, EMC testing runs through the entire “life cycle” of satellite development. In the design and analysis stage, the first is architecture design, and reasonable system analysis, power supply topology, and grounding system design must be carried out. For example, physically separate sensitive equipment from sources of interference. When designing the PCB board level, pay attention to signal integrity, power integrity, and perform filtering and shielding. When designing cable networks, different types of signal lines (such as power supply, high frequency, sensitive signals) must be classified, isolated, and shielded. Especially the grounding method should be taken very seriously. “Grounding” is the soul of EMC. Most EMC problems are related to poor or unreasonable grounding. Many weird, on-again, off-again problems are ultimately traced back to problems with cable shielding, bundling or routing. During the stand-alone test phase, it is necessary to check the equipment’s ability to emit\/withstand interference through power lines and signal lines, and to check the equipment’s ability to emit\/withstand interference through space electromagnetic waves. In the system-level test phase, satellite self-compatibility tests, radiated emission tests, radiation sensitivity\/anti-interference tests, electrostatic discharge tests, lightning and transient induction tests are mainly conducted. Satellite self-compatibility testing is the core of EMC testing. This process can expose problems the most. It is often necessary to check the interference sources and coupling paths bit by bit around the data. During the test, power on the satellite and let it enter various working modes (transmitter working at full power, sailboard driving mechanism rotating, momentum wheel accelerating, payload starting, etc.), and monitoring the working status of all sensitive equipment (especially receivers and key sensors) to see if there is any interference. For example, check whether there are any bit errors in the telemetry signal and whether there are any jumps in the attitude data. The radiated emission test is to measure the electromagnetic noise spectrum radiated by the satellite itself into space to see if it emits excessive “noise”. The radiation sensitivity\/immunity test is to use the antenna to face the satellite, simulate the strong electromagnetic environment that the outside world may encounter (such as passing over a ground radar), “irradiate” it with the specified interference field strength, and observe whether the satellite’s functional performance is normal during the entire process, and whether there will be any abnormalities or resets. The electrostatic discharge test simulates the impact of static electricity accumulated in orbit due to surface friction and other effects on the satellite when it is suddenly discharged. The lightning and transient induction test is mainly to assess whether the satellite can withstand if the launch vehicle encounters a lightning strike or generates a large current transient during the launch phase.<\/p>\n
A general EMC laboratory consists of an anechoic chamber, a control room, a power amplifier room, a conduction room, supporting power distribution systems and EMC test systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Satellites are integrated and require thousands of electronic devices to be crammed into a limited space: high-power transmitters, extremely sensitive signal receivers, high-speed computers, various motors, gyroscopes, solar wing drive mechanisms… They are connected through dense cables. The main purpose of EMC testing is to ensure that all electronic and electrical equipment can operate normally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}