Reliable Data Handling and Processing Systems for Small-Satellite Missions

We describe the development of a command and data-handling system and a payload data processor for two science missions aboard 3U CubeSats. Both are built around radiation-hardened VA41620 microcontrollers and mostly rely on radiation-tolerant magnetoresistive random-access memory for data storage; the payload data processor is equipped with an XQRKU060 field-programmable gate array that allows the implementation of a wide variety of hardware interfaces and processing algorithms. We also describe the operating system and software framework we develop to program these systems. A flexible hardware architecture and a modular software design allow to adapt them to a variety of future missions.