NASA tech for next moon mission

flhrci

flhrci

Final Approach
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David
So, I have been wondering what NASA might use for the computer in the next moon mission. Considering how little power the original Apollo computers had, do you guys think they will strap in an iPad or Samsung tablet, or use Intel or AMD Cpu's? Or a phabelt?

Or just build another multi-million dollar, custom machine?

And for software, should they just use Space Foreflight?

David
 
How well do Ipads handle radiation environments?

Flying in space ain't like dusting crops....

Ron Wanttaja
 
I'd suggest Debian on an i5 or i7 with 32GB of RAM.

On a related note, it would be interesting if they visited the Lunar Rover they left up there last time and found it stripped and sitting on cinder blocks.

Rich
 
No, I think they'd probably repurpose a set of Space Shuttle Computers. The H/W is already space qualified. They'd need new drivers to interface with the spacecraft H/W. The flight mechanics are well understood.

I just finished reading The Apollo Guidance Computer. They did an amazing amount of work with a 1 MHz clock speed, and 32K of memory.

I wonder if they'll use the Apollo paradigm - discard whatever you're done with as soon as possible, and return in the smallest capsule possible. There are 6 Apollo descent stages sitting on the moon. (11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17). Feel free to correct if I missed something. Apollo 13's descent stage got that crew back to Earth ahead of schedule, and supported them during the flight.
 
I'm waiting for them to unveil the UFO technology they got from the Nazi's after WW-2. The whole Saturn-V thing was a hoax designed to cover up the fact that NASA had been using UFO technology to get to the moon since the '50s. (Do you really believe that the Astronauts really just "happened" to find the Genesis Rock?)
 
It will most likely be a bespoke Intel based system with a Gozillion Dollar price tag.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
I'm waiting for them to unveil the UFO technology they got from the Nazi's after WW-2. The whole Saturn-V thing was a hoax designed to cover up the fact that NASA had been using UFO technology to get to the moon since the '50s. (Do you really believe that the Astronauts really just "happened" to find the Genesis Rock?)
Click to expand...

I really don’t think Genesis rocked all that much.
 
flhrci said:
So, I have been wondering what NASA might use for the computer in the next moon mission. Considering how little power the original Apollo computers had, do you guys think they will strap in an iPad or Samsung tablet, or use Intel or AMD Cpu's? Or a phabelt?

Or just build another multi-million dollar, custom machine?

And for software, should they just use Space Foreflight?

David
Click to expand...

What have they been using on the Mars rover missions? That might give us a clue.
 
wanttaja said:
How well do Ipads handle radiation environments?

Flying in space ain't like dusting crops....
Click to expand...
Actually, I worked a couple of small spacecraft programs where we used COTS processors; typically from the cell phone industry. You want 'em small, and you want 'em to be low power, that's what you end up with.

Two ways you can handle the radiation in case like this; armor the bejesus out of the electronics, or design the system to recover in case of a radiation-induced lockup or upset. We had independent countdown timers running, which the main processor reset regularly. If a timer reached zero, it was assumed the main processor had taken a hit and a complete reboot was triggered.

We have one satellite that seemed a bit more sensitive than the others; it'd rack up a reset every couple of months. Plotted the satellite location for each upset, and it practically defined the South Atlantic Anomaly....
ROSAT_SAA.gif

This was fine for a unmanned satellite, but of course you don't want radiation-induced upsets on manned spacecraft. So you end up with something custom, with the usual expensive testing.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Rgbeard said:
There’s not much radiation on a Burbank studio lot.
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Depends.

This is a famous picture, taken during the filming of "The Conqueror", a movie with John Wayne as Genghis Khan. The filming site was downwind of a nuclear test site, so they posed the Duke with his sons, checking out the local rocks with a geiger counter.
john-wayne-geiger-counter.jpg

According to Wikipedia....

"Photographs exist of John Wayne holding a Geiger counter that reportedly made so much noise that he simply thought it was broken. After location shooting, Hughes had tons of contaminated soil transported back to Hollywood in order to match interior shooting done there. Over the next thirty years, 91 of the 220 cast and crew members had developed a form of cancer."
[emphasis added]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049092/trivia

Ron Wanttaja
 
The Soviets made all of those initial Soyuz missions with a whole lot less computing power than we had.
 
Van Johnston said:
But I would think space would not need to be updated very often.
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For the first order approximation, everything in space is moving relative to everything else in space, so instead of charts, you would need a function that would calculate the motion of any given object, and a set of vector tables for each object.

The second order approximation is every object has gravity, and is affected by, and affects every other object in space. So, you'd need a two sets of vector tables. One would be used to calculate the position of each object at sometime in the future, using its base motion, and the influence of the objects around them. Once that future time hit, the table for 'now' would be used to update the table for the new positions, etc. You wouldn't need to worry about relatively light, and relatively distant objects because their influence would be small.
 
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