BOX-P – Particle Electronics Box

The BOX-P serves as a common electronics box for particle instruments, housing also the front-end electronics for the flux gate magnetometer MAG, a common power supply unit PSU-P, and a common Data Processing Unit DPU-P, each implemented as one circuit board in BOX-P.

The remaining BOX-P electronics boards (DPU-P and PSU-P) provide power and data interfaces to the particle diagnostics instruments iEPC, EPE, and IMCA external to BOX-P.

Mechanically, BOX-P has a modular design and the 3 circuit board frames stacked in a horizontal orientation. It isolates the platform from the proprietary communication protocols of MAG, iEPC, IMCA and EPE, presenting a unified standards-compliant interface to the spacecraft. Configurable data reduction techniques will allow to adjust the output data resolution for different mission phases. In addition to basic data products containing the magnetic field time series data and 3D velocity distribution functions from particle instruments, the software will also calculate data products combining the MAG data and particle data, such as pitch-angle distributions. These products were the motivation for placing the MAG electronics within BOX-P, rather than BOX-W.

BOX-P is developed by a consortium led by CBK in Warsaw, Poland with contributions from IWF, Graz, Austria, INAF in Rome, Italy and LIRA / Paris Observatory in France. BOX-P architecture is based on the Comet Interceptor DFP suite instrument with additional heritage from the RELEC project. DPU-P and PSU-P is based on a number of technologies used for (AIX) AI-eXpress, Argo, SWA, Hera and the flight software is based on heritage from Solar Orbiter (RPW) and PLATO (N-DPU) flight software.