Linux Rocket Blasts Off This Fall

Posted by timothy on Monday June 9, 2003 @04:56PM from the fwooooooof dept.

HardcoreGamer writes "An Oregon amateur rocket group, the Portland State Aerospace Society, plans to launch a Linux-powered rocket weighing 12 pounds to 55,000 feet at a speed of Mach 3 in September, Wired News reports. The rocket's onboard computer is an AMD 586 processor and a Jumptec MOPS/520 PC/104+ board along with a power supply, a PCMCIA card carrier for an 802.11b card to transmit data to the ground, and a carrier board for a 128-MB CompactFlash card for long-term storage. The flight computer runs a stripped-down version of Debian Linux, with the 2.4.20 Linux kernel. The group will present a paper (HTML | PDF ) on the use of free software in rocketry at Usenix 2003. The real question is whether their network card will survive 10 seconds at 15 Gs!"

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WiFi by Alpha_Nerd · 2003-06-09 17:05 · Score: 1, Redundant

I want a wifi card with that range!
1. Re:WiFi by deadsaijinx* · 2003-06-09 17:35 · Score: 0, Redundant
  
  they boost the power. now to be modded redundant. oh well
  
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Doppler effect? by lokedhs · 2003-06-09 21:52 · Score: 1, Redundant

At mach 3, won't the doppler effect change the frequency of the radio signal so such a degree that the receiever won't be able to communicate with the rocket?
But does it? by diablobsb · 2003-06-09 23:34 · Score: 0, Redundant

But Does it run *BSD??? :)
now seriously.... imagine a MOSIX cluster of those...

would it be a MIRV?

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