On November 9, 2005 the Venus Express Mission was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. The Venus Express Mission is to explore Venus atmosphere and its dense cloud cover of about 20 km thickness. One of the instruments on-board the spacecraft is the Venus Monitoring Camera VMC. With its miniaturized lens-system the atmosphere can be observed in parallel at four different wave ranges. The data processing unit of the camera is based on the "System-on-Chip (SOC)" approach. Several functionalities are implemented together with a SPARC-V8 compatible LEON2-CPU within a SRAM based Xilinx FPGA. This results in a compact design of 80 mm ´ 80 mm ´ 40 mm at a weight of 260 g. By the use of internal mass memory and a comprehensive set of image processing routines, extensive data processing can already be done on-board and the reduction of the limited amount of telemetry data can be achieved.
