Structural design in a space radiation shielding perspective

Radiation environment effects are a severe threat to current spacecraft design, which includes a steadily increasing amount of VLSI electronics, inherently subjected to radiation. In this frame, an approach to evaluate, since the first steps of the design process, the shielding needed to protect the sensitive devices from the TID build-up is presented. The technique allows to correctly exploit the protection offered by inherent shielding of the spacecraft structure and other massive components as the batteries, and to limit the additional shielding around the most sensitive devices. Following the concept of the minimum complementary shielding function, which is introduced in the paper, a comparison among different positioning of the devices is allowed. Profiting by the advances in environmental simulation models and codes, the proposed solution allows to consider the anisotropy of the incoming flux as far as it concerns the protonic contribution.