A lossless compression solution for SCIP and TuMag instruments aboard of SUNRISE III balloon-borne Solar Observatory

Abstract

The SUNRISE project has been conceived as a solar observatory to investigate the physics processes in the lower atmosphere of our Sun. With this aim, the SUNRISE III mission incorporates two new instruments, TuMag and SCIP, as part of its scientific payload. These instruments generate a considerable amount of data produced by 4 Mpixel sensors running up to 32 fps during around seven days. The considerable amount of data captured by the sensors must be stored for a later analysis on ground. In order to accomplish this data storage in an efficient way, a tailored version of the CCSDS 121.0-B-2 compression standard, named SLoC, has been developed for the SCIP and TuMag instruments, which is presented in this work. Experimental results prove the suitability of the proposed compression solution for the SUNRISE III mission, running over the targeted clock frequency of 150 MHz and using only the 0.8% and the 3.1% of the available BRAMs and LUTs, respectively, on a Xilinx Kintex UltraScale XCKU040 FPGA.