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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."
Obviously just "separate" networks bridged by a few high-speed high-latency links. Exactly like how continents are done now.
Colonize? I think you mean conquer, and enslave the troglodites populations to mine dilithium for our fast than light ships. Hopefully we'll be able to genetically modify navigators for them. Or find some handsome young captains to fly around and defeat gods.
They'll probably just dosconnect the failed one and plug in another one. Remember the costs per kilo of getting payload into orbit. IMHO, using only laptops makes common sense.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
"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.
We already have networks with latency comparable to round trip Earth/Mars connections. Its called Time Warner Cable.
It's been done: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_space_internet.html
rewriting history since 2109
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
OK you get two points for +1crazy. Point 1; the ISS completes an ENTIRE orbit in 90 minutes. That means that if you had an antenna pointed straight up, and say you used a moderate gain antenna with a 5 degree beam, you will get just over ONE minute of access before you need to adjust the antenna. You would need a pretty sophisticated ground tracking mechanism to have any hope of keeping the connection alive for more than a minute.
On to 2. WiFi uses an ack timeout in the microsecond range. This means that for a typically configured transceiver, you are racing the speed of light with that timeout window. The practical limit happens to be around 20 miles, or 32 kilometers. Not quite enough to get you to the ISS.
Good luck, though!
Maybe a combination or redundancy and price/power ratio? When you're sending something in to space the weight is more important the price, so it may cost them similar amounts to send up 100 laptops vs 1 huge server, but it's also a lot harder to break 100 laptops and much easier to "fix" a laptop if you have 100 spares (leave the old one in a pile and replace it when you land). One factor might be that laptops are already designed to be light, while weight isn't really a factor for most servers (so they'd have to design their own). Laptops are also designed to deal with bumps, so they may survive re-entry better.
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.
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.
"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.
a few minutes? you will at least be able to see it for several degrees.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
I saw a very interesting talk by Vint Cerf a while back. Apparently he is working with NASA to write the protocols that will be used for the interplanetary Internet.