There's basically two things that happen with radiation in orbit. * Ionizing dose weakens and disrupts crystalline structure. Wears things out / degrades thei

There's basically two things that happen with radiation in orbit. * Ionizing dose weakens and disrupts crystalline structure. Wears things out / degrades their specs. * Single, very high energy particles-- e.g. protons-- come in at high speed and change a voltage somewhere. This can have massively bad effects (e.g. it can, for non-radiation hardened parts, cause parts of the chip not meant to be a transistor to become one shorting power and ground-- this is a "single event latchup"). Or, it can affect the operation of one or a few adjacent bits of memory ("single event upset"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset