RedHat eCOS Flies in Space

Brindafella writes "Brindafella reports that Redhat is flying in space as the OS for Canada's Smallest Satellite: The Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment (CanX-1)[300k PDF], one of the flock of 1kg pico-satellites launched on 1 July 03 by a Russian rocket. Redhat eCos stands for embedded Configurable operating system, an open source real-time operating system (eCos Home Page). See the eCos Programmer's Guide for the CubeSat Computer: Introduction, Hardware Model, Development Setup, and Loading the eCos. The CANX-1 site at the University of Toronto, Canada gives more details, such as: The satellite is a 10cm cube, with a mass less than one kilogram; The satellite will generate about two Watts of peak power using direct energy conversion; Main Computer Board - Atmel AT91R40807 based on ARM7TDMI Thumb Processor, 40 MHz, 1 MB SRAM, 32 MB Flash, 200 mW max, 98 x 96 x 8 mm."

Comments

And what is cool about this approach...

[jwdg]

... is that it is allowing students (albeit mainly postgraduates) to actually try out new satellite concepts on a space platform.

This could have very positive effects for the overall cost of satellite technology - Mistakes are currently sooooo expensive! (Hopefully you can launch a little cluster of these fairly cheaply by piggybacking on other payloads).

I wonder if they'll sell me one :)

Re:And what is cool about this approach...

[pingbak]

That's exactly what NASA and DARPA were thinking last year.

However, there's more to the package than meets the eye. In the Endeavor package, we launched a pair of picosats tethered together by 50' of kevlar embedded with gold to get the antenna cross section up.

While picosats do get the cost down, development still isn't particularly inexpensive.

Re:And what is cool about this approach...

[jwdg]

I accept that the development cost is still high - but the reuse of a common platform (for basic comms, power, navigation (if applicable) infrastructure) helps. I notice that ESA has built Mars Express on a standard "bus" that they hope can be reused for other interplanetary missions (e.g. to Venus).

The consequence of increasing knowledge of space technology is that parts of it can maybe be a little more routine (though still scary/exciting when you think that your code - possibly bugs and all - is in space!)

They're using Red Hat?!

[Mordant]

I can't wait for the news headline - "Satellite lost due to unresolved RPM dependencies . . ." ;>

Re:Better not have the swap...

[torpor]

Lets just say they used good FLASH, and no swap (eCOS needs no swap).

The FLASH is probably only for uploading new program code to run the instruments onboard - I doubt they're using it for realtime storage, since that'd best be done downstairs. Since typical FLASH systems can withstand 10,000 or so re-writes before things go bitty, and presumably these guys used good stuff, I'd say thats enough for a lot of program updates.

Earlier picosat technology

[pingbak]

I was involved in a DARPA picosat effort last year; I can actually say my code launched off Endeavor back on December 12th. Our picosats also used the ARM as the "main host" on the stack, had 8MB of flash, used a Rockwell/Conexant digital cordless telephone chip for the radio boards. I seem to recall we used vxWorks for our main host. I wrote the Conexant-related comms code.

At the time, the company I work for "unexpectedly" inherited the picosat project from another NASA and DARPA contractor. Embedded Linux wasn't really an option since we had a lot to do in very little time.

Writing code that flew in space definitely rocked!

Re:Direct Engery Conversion??

[pingbak]

It's called "solar power".

STS-113 Endeavor picosat photos

[pingbak]

I forgot to include this in my earlier posting: STS-113 pre-flight and picosat launch photos

Enjoy!