Space is a vacuum but it is far from empty, racked with charged particles from the Sun and sources in deep space. Components for space missions therefore have to be tested against radiation at facilities such as ESA’s Cobalt-60 facility at its ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands. So what happens when we test standard issue smartphones against its beam of gamma rays?

On 12-16 November 2018 ESTEC hosts SERESSA, the 14th international School on the Effects of Radiation on Embedded Systems for Space Applications, training engineers on radiation effects on all kinds of embedded systems from space and avionics systems, as well as for critical applications operating at ground level such as automotive, medical or even banking.