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3D PLUS has more than 210,000 microelectronics components in space, and more than 25 years of flight heritage with no reported failure. Our Flight Heritage is expanding continuously with products launched in Space every month in LEO, MEO and GEO orbits, for deep space exploration missions, for satellite constellation fleets, and for governmental missions in Europe, America, and Asia. Our Flagship missions include Mars 2020, Mars Science Laboratory, Rosetta, New Horizons, Juno, OneWeb, AlphaSat, Sentinel, Ariane 5, ISS, Parker Solar Probe, Insight, and many more.
On Tuesday, April 1, NASA reached a historic milestone with the launch of the Artemis II mission. This flight marked the first crewed journey toward the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, propelling the crew far beyond low Earth orbit. Aboard the Orion spacecraft, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen completed a nine-day journey around our natural satellite.
Credit : NASA/Kim Shiflett
Despite the general enthusiasm, this mission involved significant risks. Statistical estimates placed the probability of crew loss at more than 1 in 50. For comparison, this figure was 1 in 276 for the SpaceX Demo-2 flight to the International Space Station. While the reliability of these calculation methods is often debated within the scientific community, they underscored the complexity and perilous nature of this lunar expedition.
The fundamental goal of Artemis II was to validate the performance of the Orion vehicle in a crewed configuration. After an initial phase in Earth orbit, the spacecraft adopted a free-return trajectory: it swung around the Moon to return to Earth using natural gravitational assistance. This flyby allowed for the verification of the reliability of life support and navigation systems in deep space, but above all, it prepared for one of the most delicate phases of the mission: the return to Earth.
Unlike capsules returning from low orbit, Orion had to dissipate monumental energy during atmospheric reentry. The spacecraft reached “second cosmic velocity“, more than thirty times the speed of sound. This thermal resistance test was crucial to ensuring the safety of future missions aiming for a new lunar landing in the coming years.
The mission utilized the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, a space giant that operates in stages: during the ascent, the side boosters and the central tank detached and fell into the ocean, as they are not reusable. At the top of this launcher, only the Orion capsule carried the four astronauts. At the end of the mission, only the capsule returned to Earth; after its atmospheric reentry, it splashed down under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean before being recovered.
Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
The operation of the Orion spacecraft relies on electronic modules designed for the constraints of deep space. 3D PLUS provides data storage solutions adapted to this environment: volatile SDRAM memories (DDR2, DDR3) for processing onboard information, as well as non-volatile MRAM, EEPROM, and Flash NAND memories for preserving flight parameters. To protect these systems against cosmic particles, these modules integrate the RIMC (Radiation Mitigation Solution), a device dedicated to mitigating radiation effects to ensure the operational continuity of the electronics.
