ИСТИНА

In a wide range of characteristics of the corpuscular radiation of the near-Earth outer space, protons dominate (more than 90%), which have a high penetrating power and cause radiation damage and upset the onboard electronics (OBE) of the spacecraft. The nature of failures can be either degradation of the initial characteristics of OBE elements with increasing radiation dose, or a failure as a result of a generation of a sufficiently high number of electron-hole pairs during ionization of OBE atoms by passing primary radiation (protons), or products of nuclear reactions between primary radiation and OBE atomic nuclei. In the paper we give a brief analysis of the probability of failures of electronics under the influence of primary radiation and fragments-products of nuclear reactions, which have a significantly higher ionizing capability. Modern advanced programs based on current nuclear data base can help to provide distributions of the residuals over charge, mass and kinetic energy, which can be used to estimate the probability and rate of the Single Event Effects (SEE). It is shown that the obtained results can be used to estimate the upset volume and predict whether a single bit or multiple bits will be upset in a device with certain radiation hardness. A possible contribution of extreme fluctuations in ionizing power of the incident particles in the SCE material is also discussed.