I would advise you to read through the project information first, but if you are here for sub-team information, check here:
CADENCE serves as a pathfinder mission to determine shielding requirements for critical spacecraft hardware through a radiation sensing payload capable of measuring and assessing the local radiation environment.
The Compact Autonomous Detector Experiment ****for eNvironment Coarse-energy Evaluation is a university-led mission under the Air Force Research Lab’s (AFRL) University Nanosatellite Program (UNP).
Currently, the Bronco Space Lab is under the NS-12 cohort with CADENCE. At the time this page is being written, CADENCE has completed the Preliminary Design Review at the end of 2025 and is now on track for Critical Design Review at the end of 2026.
The UNP program aims to teach students the full-scale design behind missions. Through different reviews, students get the chance to not only build the model for a satellite, but it also allows students to experience the systems design behind all missions. The program also offers a select few schools the opportunity to launch. Phase A lasts two years (currently we are halfway through with Phase A). Getting selected for flight transitions mission into Phase B, which could lead up to another three years of development for the mission.
CADENCE is a 6U CubeSat mission led by students of the Bronco Space Lab at Cal Poly Pomona, with the objective of better understanding how radiation in the space environment affects critical hardware and how it can be better protected by testing various shielding thicknesses across radiation sensors. The payload consists of RadFETs that track total ionizing dose, or accumulated radiation, behind various levels of shielding ranging from 100 microns to 1 cm, as well as a CMOS imager for tracking single event effect rates. As a secondary objective to understanding the shielding levels necessary for protecting critical spacecraft components, CADENCE acts as a stepping stone for future missions through the development of a low-SWaP-C radiation sensing payload. Its minimal resource consumption allows it to be integrated into other spacecraft with little to no drawbacks. While the CADENCE mission does not completely solve the issue of spacecraft protection and space-weather situational awareness, it serves as a precursor for future spacecraft missions.
The original concept for CADENCE was a wildfire detection pair of satellites, with the leading satellite running a machine learning algorithm to detect a wildfire (observing the Earth from orbit) and transmitting the detection to a trailing satellite.
Artist's Rendition of the Original CADENCE Concept
Within the scope of UNP, the CADENCE mission strives to demonstrate how a single satellite can utilize a low-SWaP-C instrument to collect and process data in real time to develop an understanding of the local space environment and, in turn, determine the levels of shielding necessary to protect critical spacecraft components. CADENCE leverages the i.MX8X processor as the main flight computer, which is also used in the Bronco Space Lab’s SCALES project (Spacecraft Compartmentalized Autonomous Learning and Edge-computing System).
Due to the lack of public documentation on radiation test data for the i.MX8X processor, the CADENCE mission aims to serve as a pathfinder for testing and studying various levels of shielding to protect critical spacecraft hardware, such that future flights involving SCALES will be better prepared for the harsh radiation environment.
Because much of the high radiation in the space environment is transient, the mission leverages naturally occurring high-radiation regions within low Earth orbit (LEO) as repeatable radiation events. Within LEO, CADENCE plans to conduct experiments in both the South Atlantic Anomaly and the auroral ovals, both of which contain a high density of energetic particles as a result of Earth’s magnetic field. By guaranteeing exposure to high-radiation environments, CADENCE can test the effectiveness of the shielding on the RadFETs in a real space environment rather than in a test lab.
The low-SWaP-C instrument uses both flight-proven RadFET sensors to track TID and conduct coarse energy spectroscopy of the local space environment, and CMOS image sensors to track SEEs to enable the spacecraft to characterize its own local environment. Against a dark frame, energetic particles deposit a high charge and appear as “bright spots” when passing through the pixels of the image sensor, enabling the ability to characterize and count the number of SEEs in a given image.
By integrating flight-proven technology, CADENCE-SWANS reduces technological risk while introducing a key innovation: differential aluminum shielding with thicknesses ranging from 100 µm to 1 cm. This shielding approach filters incoming particles to enable energy spectroscopy within the 250 keV to 50 MeV range. This energy range specifically targets particle energies commonly observed in the South Atlantic Anomaly, enabling direct characterization of this well-studied radiation environment.
While the differential shielding approach builds on techniques demonstrated in constellation-scale radiation monitoring, CADENCE advances beyond simple data collection to autonomous onboard event characterization.