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The Tech Aboard the International Space Station
CNETNate writes "With its own file server for uploaded Hollywood blockbusters, a 10Mbps Internet connection to Earth, and around a hundred IBM ThinkPad notebooks, the consumer technology aboard the $150 billion International Space Station is impressive. It's the responsibility of just two guys to maintain the uptime of the Space Station's IT, and they have given CNET an in-depth interview to explain what tech's aboard, how it works, and whether Windows viruses are a threat to the astronauts. In a related feature, the Space Station's internal network (which operates over bandwidth of just 1Mbps) and its connected array of Lenovo notebooks is explained, along with the tech we could see in the future."
In the very long run, after we colonize Mars and possibly the Moon, latency issues will become even more severe. It will be interesting to see whether we will simply give them separate networks or have those networks as part of the internet. If the second occurs, we may need new protocols to deal with the large latency and related issues.
"One of the T61ps is a server, making it a client/server network with a couple of routers and an Ethernet backbone.."
You're telling me that with over a hundred machines up there that they have a single point of failure for their domain architecture? And it's a laptop? Hey NASA, ever hear of high-availability?
Granted they probably don't use that many domain resources, but you'd think if they were going to use any specific kind of tech that they would make sure it was redundant. You'd think with how much they spent for this space-station that they'd make an appropriate IT purchase..
The max ground distance for unamplified WiFi is about 200km. The ISS orbits between 340 and 350km, therefore I say we all point our collective WiFi antennae up and try and see the first person to connect up to their network. Of course, you'd only have about 90 minutes of access as I recall; the ISS orbits too fast for much more access time.
"Crew members aboard the ISS can request specific films and TV shows to be uploaded to a central file server, which they can then watch on any of the Station's laptops."
Space pirates!!
It's very sad, with the real high tech shit aboard the ISS, that consumer grade electronics are featured as 'the tech of ISS'.
housing 68 IBM ThinkPad A31 laptops from 2002, each boasting a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive.
It turns out these double as the main heat supply for the ISS as well.
Nah, wouldn't be so bad.
ISS orbits at between 278 km (173 mi) and 460 km (286 mi) from Earth.
LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites orbit at about 400 km, and Geostationary sats orbit at 35,786 km over the equator.
I'm connected to a GEO sat right now (I'm in the Gulf of Aden atm), and ping time is just under 800ms. Not great, admittedly, but really not bad.
I imagine NASA keeps their pipe pretty full 24/7 and that might generate some lag, but at their altitude, they are probably getting 300ms ping times or better. It also depends on where your data goes once it hits the Earth station. We had a horrible bottleneck at Eik, Norway so we routed the data through Mirimar, Florida and it lopped off about 600ms from our ping time.
I'm guessing NASA has a pretty sweet peering arrangement ;)
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Each module probably has it's own laptop per experiment. Not to mention stored laptops for when the space shuttle crew comes on board.
These systems are most likely being used for data input/output and monitoring of experiments. It would be silly to do everything from one computer.
Once upon a time, large portions of the internet were "store and forward."
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
"mankind's first permanent space colony"
Someone needs to tell Mark Harris that the ISS is scheduled to be deorbited 1Q 2016 before he moves in to his condo there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station
-- Terry
What happens to these laptops when they are decommissioned? They mentioned these thinkpads are from 2002 (which makes them the same vintage as the ones I use for myself at home); will they be sold off when they are replaced? I would love for my next laptop to be one that spent several years in orbit!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Hey, I have an idea! Maybe thepiratebay.org could relocate their servers to be colocated on the ISS. I think the upper stratosphere is out of the Swedish court's jurisdiction! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Actually I am sure that the ISS is using TDRS or it's replacment for their link. I would bet that the ISS has at least one geosynchronous bounce at all times.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Our scientific equipment "Declic" was sent to the ISS last august. It runs Linux and uC-OS II on a whole pile of microprocessors. The Linux of the part of the system that we built was completely custom built based on "linux from scratch". For an interesting read: Linux Journal
The 2.6 kernel was state of the art when we built it, but we needed its lower latency features.
NASA requires you to use the thinkpads. Not that they are anything special other than they have gone through a battery of tests and have a few mods to help with cooling and power requirements. Offer them all you want for free and they'll say no. The main reason for so many are that each one more than likely is dedicated to a single use. If you have 60 experiments, then you have 60 laptops. It's quite a bit of effort and paperwork to certify that any application you need to run on a laptop plays nicely with everything else. Even if your program is a whopping 100kb controller for some piece of equipment. This is done because you typically don't have a whole lot of overlap between who is supplying the experiments so cross testing is difficult. The last thing you want to do is try to fire up an experiment, not have it work and then have to waste everyones time figuring out what isn't playing nice with what. It's just easier to dedicate a whole laptop.
"One thing that really impacts the crew's day-to-day operations is if the file server itself fails. This forces them to reload the hard drive and re-establish all the network drives and all the apps. They actually have to get out the media and load the image to the hard drive. That's a significant hit for the crew because we can't do everything for them from the ground.
Jesus Christ, given the cost per minute keeping those guys up there, I'd think they'd at the very least have redundant servers with redundant media.
In the very long run, after we colonize Mars and possibly the Moon, latency issues will become even more severe. It will be interesting to see whether we will simply give them separate networks or have those networks as part of the internet. If the second occurs, we may need new protocols to deal with the large latency and related issues.
Er, Wow. You're worried about network latency and we haven't even put the first human-inhabitable structure on our moon yet. Cripes man, perhaps you should step back just a few parsecs and realize we might just need stuff like an oxygen-rich environment first, for when you want to hyperventilate whilst flogging your Captains Log to Martian Porn some 250,000 miles away...
a few minutes? you will at least be able to see it for several degrees.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
I know someone else has pointed to this, but I think it bears repeating:
article quote: "If the crew wants specific movies, music or TV shows, we can uplink them to the server and they can then access them from any computer."
If these movies are coming from a DVD format, then DMCA violations are certainly occuring at NASA.