Linux In Space: Red Hat Rides The Rocket

neiljt writes "BBC News have a piece on NASA experiments to use IP for space missions. The article is a little low-tech, but more details available from NASA (OMNI). Is this the first Red Hat in space?" It's worth pointing out as well that Debian made the ride nearly six years ago. Still, great news.

Comments

FlightLinux Project at NASA

[jim.b0b]

It seems NASA had a Flight Linux project that ended in June 2002. Interestingly enough, they link back to slashdot in their publications listing.

VOIP in space = not new

[forged]

The article talks about IP in general, and of course it makes sense. I'd like to remaind us that VOIP to be more specific, was already featured last year ! They flew IP-telephony software from Cisco to the ISS and tried calling home with great success. IP makes adding voice to data (or the other way round however you want to see it) a reality.

and contrary to analog radio transmission which are prone to interferences and background noise/hiss, VOIP actually makes a lot of sense in space. All it requires is a data channel with limited bandwidth (64kbits is plentiful) but short delay, and the voice quality is just as good as with a regular phone call.

Maybe NASA saw in IP a cheaper alternative for astronauts to get pr0n than having to fly (heavier) tabloid magazines to space? :->

Re:NASA...cutting edge??

[Hellkitten]

budget cut backs must be really hurting them if they're sending that computer to space

So what makes you think they didn't consider faster processors?

For all you (and I) know NASA could have performed tests indicating that modern 3Ghz prosessors are more prone to bit errors caused by radiation in space than older processors.

The difference in cost between a fast prosessor and a 233Mhz on isn't likely to affect the budget of a space shuttle launch, (hell, the 233 may be a custom job and cost more for all we know) so I expect that when nasa engineers went for the slower one they had a damn good reason

Besides the computer is supposed to be used for transferring data back to NASA, how much processor do you need for that? It's not like they'll be recompiling their kernel a lot in orbit is there?

Re:NASA...cutting edge??

[gte910h]

Nasa uses 2/386's because radiation effects these chips wider transistor paths MUCH less than the current 2.4 GHZ models. There are several orders of magnitudes difference in the size of those internal chip traces. The smaller the path, the more solar radiation affects it.