Do we need special, radiation hardened CPUs for the computers? | Computer Systems Workgroup | Forum

Do we need special, radiation hardened CPUs for the computers?

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1:41 am
November 14, 2009

brmj

Rochester, New York, United States

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posts 402

I was looking at information on such things, and it looks like they are ridiculously antiquated and expensive usually. It turns out that 486 and Pentium derivatives are probably the fastest radiation hardened x86 processors available. Debian, for example, will happily run on such things if a GUI isn't required, but I think this would be sub-optimal. I'm thinking we might be better off with modern, consumer hardware and hardware and software level redundancy and some sort of physical radiation shielding. I just came across a company that has some sort of shiny new nanotech radiation shielding fabric. It's a bit expensive, but it would let us use stranded electronics without the weight of lead shielding or equivalent.

What does everyone think about this issue?

Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)

8:41 am
December 24, 2009

PKillian

Green Bay, Wisconsin

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posts 6

Post edited 2:41 pm – December 24, 2009 by PKillian

I honestly think we need an astro and nuclear physist to assist us with this quandry. Beyond the ionisphere, am I not sure how strong the radiation would be, how it would necessarily affect electronics, and to what degree of shielding we would need.

Space vehicle development is no longer a sole venture by governments and therefore probably now a lot less secretive; would it be possible to somehow learn how other space venture companies handle this issue? I know we all would want all ideas to be organic, but if we can learn from other people's past mistakes and triumphs it would be must better for us than spending our time and resources on something that could be answered with a series of emails to space venture companies and/or collegiate science departments.

9:31 am
December 24, 2009

Luke Maurits

Adelaide, Australia

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posts 1483

We do actually have an astrophysics undergrad on the forums somewhere who seemed keen on learning more about this, but I'm not sure where they've gone.

While it's true that there are now numerous non-government space travel agencies, very few of the private groups in space now are operating under and open source perspective. I doubt we would be able to learn much more than high level details from looking at the work of other groups, but if we can then we absolutely should.

My intuition on this is that radiation hardening won't be that hard. Particle radiation is really easy to shield against. If the computers are inside the pressure vessel of the cabin then the combined shielding of the cabin structure and the heatshield should absolutely keep alpha and beta particles out. Electromagentic radiation will be the real challenge, but even that shouldn't be too hard to shield against. If we have multiple redundant computers we only need to shield radiation to such an extent that the odds of a majority of them being messed with simultaneously are low.

It's worth bearing in mind that radiation shielding will also be important for the astronaut. I don't know which will be less tollerant to the radiation involved, our electronics or the astronaut.

Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

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