May 20 2010
Satellites launched in space for the detection of environmental gases and nuclear events are presently experiencing a sort of data logjam problem since powerful sensors mounted on board the satellite deliver more information than their existing bandwidth is able to transmit to earth.
The International Space Station trials carried out by Sandia National Laboratories have shown that the logjam issue could be resolved by putting more complex chips in the satellite orbit so that the large data stream can be pre-reduced.
Increase in on-board computing capabilities could ideally imply that only the relevant information is transmitted to Earth. However, the functioning of the most recent computer electronics in outer space’s harsh environment has not been resolved and validated so far. There were apprehensions about the transistors being bombarded by high energy particles in space, possibly resulting in a change of ones to zeroes or vice versa thereby transforming the value of a single calculation and providing wrong results that could affect vital environmental and national security calculations.
Experiments conducted by Sandia have helped the understanding of the high-energy radiation effects on computing electronics. Such an understanding will help scientists to reduce the disastrous effects of high-energy radiation on processing architecture designs in the future.
According to Dave Bullington, head engineer of Sandia’s low Earth orbit experiment, scientists are currently able to receive space environment’s true on-orbit data and the satellite is able to transmit data messages to Earth every four minutes.
The ‘Materials on the International Space Station Experiment (MISSE),’ a NASA program conducted under the Naval Research Laboratory’s direction, offers opportunities for inexpensive, fast and low risk flight tests of equipment and material in space.
The MISSE 7, the seventh of the MISSE flight series, has provided researchers with data and power connections from the International Space Station (ISS) for performing actively powered experiments. The space shuttle that carried the MISSE 7 was launched on Nov 16, 2009. On November 23, 2009, passive experiment containers were installed on the ISS’ exterior, so that the experiments are exposed to the hazards of space environment. This research payload has been sending data to Sandia since its installation.
Sandia engineers are testing commercially available field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to verify and validate the reliability of their performance in space, and if found suitable they will be incorporated in future high consequential operational systems.
The SEU Xilinx-Sandia Experiment (SEUXSE) that was designed by Xilinx and Sandia is flown on the MISSE 7. SEUXE incorporates Xilinx’s Virtex 5 FPGA that is not qualified for space and Virtex 4 FPGA, a space-qualified chip. The data from this experimental platform is gathered so that future Sandia program researchers would ascertain the manner in which the POL converters and FPGAs perform in space conditions. This study would help researchers to evolve means for designing mitigation techniques for processing routines so that upsets experienced in space can be tackled.
Source: http://www.sandia.gov