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C h a p t e r 1 SURVIVING AND PERFORMING IN HARSH SPACE ENVIRONMENTS Gianluca Furano Senior Data Systems Engineer, European Space Agency Unlike legacy satellites built with rad-hard components, modern Low Earth Orbit (LEO) mega-constellations rely on commercial off-the-shelf parts, making them far more susceptible to the harsh realities of the space environment. Consequently, these systems now suffer predominantly from 'soft' failures, such as control-plane software crashes and network synchronization drops, triggered by the rapid thermal cycling and radiation upsets flipping memory bits." Space system engineers must design electronics for environments that expose weak margins and catalyze failure mechanisms. For example, orbits subject electronics to radiation, vacuum, vibration, and extreme temperature cycling. Meanwhile, modern mission profiles only increase the stress on the designer. With more frequent launches, engineers are being forced to trade conservative design margins for speed and manufacturability. As a result, designers now face different dominant failure mechanisms than they did just five years ago. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) missions are becoming more common, and they reduce total ionizing dose exposure compared with Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) missions. However, this benefit comes with a trade-off. Thermal cycling increases dramatically as satellites transition between sunlight and eclipse roughly every 90 minutes. In these changing thermal conditions, packages experience frequent expansion and contraction cycles, placing solder joints and die-attach structures under continuous mechanical fatigue. Over time, these stresses can degrade reliability even when radiation exposure remains within acceptable limits. 6 11 Experts Discuss Designing Space Electronics for the New Space Race