Sophisticated spacecraft often operate with surprisingly outdated or seemingly underpowered computing systems.
It’s often pointed out that NASA put men on the Moon with far less processing power than most people carry in their pockets today, but modern spacecraft also frequently rely on older systems.
The cutting-edge Perseverance Mars rover, for example, runs on a PowerPC 750 – the same processor that was used to run iMacs in the late 1990s.
One of the reasons is that sophisticated electronic equipment can be vulnerable to damage in space and must be both physically shielded and protected from radiation.
Now, San Francisco-based space computing specialist Aethero is planning to send some of the fastest computational equipment into space using new shielding techniques.
AetherNxN is a small, stackable computer built on a Nvidia Orin processor and it will be deployed on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission later this month.
It will be protected by a new combined physical and radiation shielding material developed by Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC).
Aethero co-founder Edward Ge said that the CSC shielding enabled them to take AI-capable hardware into space where it could operate under extremely hostile conditions.
Plasteel moves from sci-fi to real space technology
Most materials used for shielding in space use combinations of metals such as aluminium and tantalum with radiation resistance built into the design.
CSC’s shielding uses a new 3D-printed material called Plasteel – a term first used in a spacefaring context in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune.
The material is a fabricated polymer blend that is more flexible than aluminium, allowing it to be used in a diverse range of components.
It also features a uniformly distributed layer of radiation-blocking nanoparticles, which works to reduce the overall doses of radiation that the computer is exposed to, as well as ‘single event effects’.
These single event effects occur when a single ionising particle damages or affects the circuit.
CSC co-founder and CEO Yanni Barghouty likened such incidents to a bullet striking compared to 100 tennis balls being hit against a wall – the overall kinetic energy may be similar, but the bullet is obviously more dangerous.
Barghouty and Ge said that next-generation shielding technologies will be required to take advanced, complex processors into space, with numerous potential applications.
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