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A Supercomputer On the Moon To Direct Deep Space Traffic
Hugh Pickens writes "NASA currently controls its deep space missions through a network of 13 giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia known as the Deep Space Network (DSN) but the network is obsolete and just not up to the job of transmitting the growing workload of extra-terrestrial data from deep space missions. That's why Ouliang Chang has proposed building a massive supercomputer in a deep dark crater on the side of the moon facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter. Nuclear-powered, it would accept signals from space, store them, process them if needed and then relay the data back to Earth as time and bandwidth allows. The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon's poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier, and would communicate with spaceships and earth using a system of inflatable, steerable antennas that would hang suspended over moon craters, giving the Deep Space Network a second focal point away from earth. As well as boosting humanity's space-borne communication abilities, Chang's presentation at a space conference (PDF) in Pasadena, California also suggests that the moon-based dishes could work in unison with those on Earth to perform very-long-baseline interferometry, which allows multiple telescopes to be combined to emulate one huge telescope. Best of all the project has the potential to excite the imagination of future spacegoers and get men back on the moon."
Aren't they afraid it will launch rocks at the earth if it achieves self-awareness?
Leave the computing power here on Earth, where it can easily be installed, repaired, and upgraded as necessary without budget-busting missions. Put a simple relay station on the moon if you feel it's necessary. Put two - one primary, once backup. Good god.
Perhaps this computer will be 3D printed as well, and powered by privately launched solar arrays? I mean, if you're going delusional, might as well go full out. The nurses don't mind either way, they just up your dose of Haloperidol.
> in a deep dark crater on the side of the moon facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter
Great... so the one good place we could put radio telescopes because they are shielded from chatter is now ruined because there is a big-ass transmitter.
That would be incredible thing to do. I bet it would be interesting to use its idle time to projects like SETI.
I am all for going back to the moon. I'm all for placing a permanent station on the moon. Let's really study what's up there. Let's make an attempt at actually studying space from space.
Its why the shuttles ran off of 386's, and the current mars rover uses something kin to a 233mhz G3, now all of a sudden we can stick a super-computer on the moon? Set aside the repair bill when it blows something, how many radiation hardened super-computers are available, and more importantly how old are they?
I always thought that putting a radio-telescope on the back side of the moon would be a good idea since the moon would block all the electromagnetic noise from Earth. Two could be installed, one just over the curve near the north pole and one near the south pole. This would give a baseline of appropriately the diameter of the moon. It would be one, big ear.
Don't stop where the ink does.
Initially I thought the headline said the supercomputer was to direct "sheep space traffic". I would get to sleep much quicker knowing that we have a supercomputer doing the sheep counting for me at night.
Gonna need one massive battery backup system. Does Amazon deliver to the moon yet?
Maybe also build a big catapult.
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There are new things every year in the field of IT. Even as we get used to cloud computing there are other big ideas waiting in the horizon waiting to take over. One such idea is big data and the other is peercling.
Data is going to be on the rise and it is going to be a difficult task to maintain all the data and get an understanding of it as it is expected to go up by fifty times in the next eight years so big data will play a key role in analyzing it. It will be fast and will give different angles of analysis to the same data. The major aspects that big data will be concentrating on will be economics of scale, affordability, agility and extensibility. Precision the enormous amount of data which it will help in analyzing will be it’s biggest advantages.
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Isn't the moon suffering impacts all the time? Isn't it risky to leave a supercomputer there?
I thought heat-sinking in near-vacuum conditions was difficult because, although it's very cold temperature-wise, the ability of the "air" to hold heat is so limited that you can't move very much away.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Let's take it out of all the EM chatter on the earth, and instead put it inside of all the EM chatter from the SUN. That sounds like a pretty good idea.
The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon's poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier
Actually that is NOT what the article says. I know on slashdot that us commenters rarely read the article but things are getting pretty bad if not even the submitter reads the article!
The reason for locating it at the poles (as the article explains) is due to the availability of water ice for cooling. You stick it in a deep crater there to provide a stable thermal environment i.e. you avoid having to design a system to cope with both the heat during the day and the cold at night. The reason this is important is because vacuum is a fantastic insulator so, despite it being cold, the only way to lose that heat is via radiation which is not very fast (this is why thermos flasks use vacuum as an insulator). The presence of water ice means that you can use it to transport the heat away from the the computer.
A supercomputer? On the moon? To relay deep space traffic? Gee I can only imagine how many tens of billions that will cost. Not like something couldn't be built on the earth for a fraction of the cost and complexity. Why is NASA even the one to run and build what amounts to a telecommunications network? They should be farming this out to industry.
Those are not real difficulties. The computing centre would be underground, that provides excellent radiation shielding. Computer just needs to survive transportation (when it will not be running) once. much simpler than the shuttle. You don't repair anything, just send a bit extra and apply fail-in-place maintenance strategy... What would be really cool is if they plan to operate at a natural temp... they could be designed for exploit superconduction... maybe the computer would be completely different from earthbound designs.
Also, the dark side of the moon near the poles will not remain cold once the moon rotates around and the "dark side" becomes exposed.
Yes, the moon does rotate, it's just tidally locked, so its rotation is the same as its orbit. when we see a new moon, it's a full moon on the "dark" side. Just clearing that up before I get a flamewar again over the subject.
It's a lame excuse for a "man in space" pork program. There's not much data coming back from space beyond Earth orbit, because there isn't that much hardware beyond Earth orbit. Right now, only Voyager I, Cassini, and the Mars rover are transmitting. The total data rate from all of them would fit over a dial-up line.
There are some bottlenecks in dealing with all the stuff in earth orbit. More satellites in the TDRSS system, or more ground stations, may be needed. Assets on the Moon wouldn't help.
How about we don't. I'd rather not have the Lunies throwing rocks at Earth in the future.
R. Daneel Olivaw. directed more than deep space traffic.
it's a space sta^h^h^h datacenter.
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One's already there. Just needs a cell phone and a marine detachment to purge all the damn Nazis.
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Go ahead, put it out there. But remember... Finders keepers losers weepers.
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I'm pretty sure you could build yourself a whole bunch of ground-based dishes, or even a few geo-stationary relay stations, for the cost of a moon base and relay infrastructure to get the data from the far side to the near side. There are reasons to put stuff on the far side of the moon, but handling comm traffic from the dozen or so probes we've put out there isn't one of them.
What about ALW? Anthropic Lunar Warming.
Have gnu, will travel.
Have gnu, will travel.
What's the advantage of landing a bunch of computers on the moon? Also, it's much easier to get a high bandwidth signal to an Earth satellite (including on the moon), so why would we want to process the data there with computers that will quickly become obsolete instead of just creating a simple and reliable relay station?
Given the moon's 28.5 day rotation, wouldn't a single antenna on the far side of the moon be blocked from any particular deep-space target for significant periods of time? On the order of two weeks out of every month? So you'd need at least a couple of these in order to avoid the problem.
A story about super computers and not one comment about a Beowulf Cluster??
No, it's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_on_the_moon
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How about we build a FAKE moon instead, that we can move and rotate to wherever we want. We may have to bring in the DoD on this to get funding, and... they may want to test a giant laser on it. In fact this may become a DoD project completely due to funding shortages, but they have promised us we will get some time on their supercomputer, when they are not firing their laser at things.
they gonna build it by that big body of moon water?
Serenity now, insanity later.
MSL is returning about 1 Tbit/day these days. Opportunity is returning a fair amount as well. HiRise camera on MRO can fill the 4 Mbps pipe from MRO. Oh, yeah, Juno will be sending back a fair amount when it gets to Jupiter. ANd the, there's Odyssey and Mars Express. And a few others.
I realize human's will usually prefer 'instant gratification', but... Shouldn't we hold off on these great ideas until we have a fully capable moon base up and running. Hell, once we've established that (and worked out all the unforseen problems of a moon base), it will make lots of these ideas more feasible and cheaper to perform.
Will it transmit Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in a never-ending loop?
*** Don't be dull.***
Sounds like Veda!
Why do you need a "supercomputer" to "process" and relay signals?
How are "processed" signals going to get to earth from a station on the dark side of the moon without a line of sight back to earth?
How exactly does spending (high) three digit billions (at the very least) to build this system rather than (low) double digit billions to replace/upgrade the existing system make any sense whatsoever?
Not to mention that even with steerable antennas on the farside, this system won't replace the 24/7 communications capability currently available.
... the L4 and L5 points.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Ok, great, put an antenna on the far side of the moon to shield it from the noise coming from Earth. But how is the data supposed to get to and from that far-side antenna? Oh yeah, inflatable antennae floating over some craters. What? Are they inflated with Helium or something? How are they supposed to float over the moon in the vacuum of space?
Good luck on getting Netapp/IBM/HDS/EMC agree to cost-free replacement on site in less than four hours.
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Give them an inch and they'll gain artificial intelligence!
I'm hosting my websites and data on AWS MoonBase!
They're not floating, dumbass. It's a good space construction technique because inflatables are lighter than a rigid structure that collapse to the same size for launch.
Put the super computer deep in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Cooling problem (impossible to deal with on the Moon) solved.
Access? Not easy but a couple of orders of magnitude better than the moon.
Interference? Not much. More like blockage through general clag in the atmosphere.
Dishes? Float them. Float a dozen which will randomly point in various directions as the swell tilts them. But who cares -- You've got a supercomputer to deal with trivia like that.
In two words BS.
Won't they have to fumigate the place and get rid of the pesky rock critters first, to keep them from gnawing on the cables as shown in Apollo 18
OK, so the moon is yellow now and all satellites will have to stop when it turns red?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
a use for one of those Sun Micro data centers in shipping containers!!
"To deliver computing power to where its needed."
Stupid, stupid stupid. The whole point to to avoid the tyranny of location and move the data, not the computer.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Commercially, you can get an ADC with 4-bits of resolution (3 effective) ADC that's good out to 26GHz. These kinds of advances in ADC technology greatly simplify the RF requirements by eliminating a whole bank of local oscillators, mixers, amplifiers, splitters, and the like. If you read the CARMA website, you can see that they've greatly reduced the amount of electronics needed to capture all the bandwidth for both polarizations from each of their 26 antennas.
(BTW: CARMA effectively samples 4 bits at 20GHz, but they integrate from between 1 and 20 seconds for an astronomical target; this is one thing that allows them to get such stunning images with such a low effective number of bits )
It's way cheaper to invest in new antenna technology than to create such an insanely expensive alternative. The only advantage I could see would be for ultra quiet radio astronomy, where you have little thermal noise from the planet, and no radio-frequency-interference or atmospheric attenuation, which on earth is mostly inhibited by water-vapor at very high frequencies.
It's a bit of a jump I know, but some of the parallels are interesting.
Nuclear power on the dark side~ big explosion~ moon escapes Earth orbit etc etc.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Does the nuclear industry have a program where scientists proposing to put something on the moon get paid for adding in a nuclear reactor to the plan? Or is NASA in the nuclear industry's pocket? Are big rocket makers also into nukes? Gee! GE!
That half of the moon is in the sun 14 out of every 28 days, even though it is the 'dark' side. I cannot believe a humongous set of batteries would cost/weigh less than a nuclear reactor, and it definitely would be easier to maintain. There are numerous other options for energy storage and retrieval, which would be more appropriate and make more use of found materials on the Moon. Solar cell manufacture on the Moon, from lunar materials, is another technology it would be very good to master.
I can see some cheezy James Bond plot being executed where Larry Elison launches a space shuttle from his evil island lair and installs Oracle on it.
future I imagine all manner of antennae on the moon relaying and supercomputers and what have you but space economies of scale don't lend well to this right now. I think we need to have a presence on the moon but a more self sustaining one, that doesn't depend on the earth at all.
To spend so much money on this project, I will GUARANTEE that it will somehow be used by the US military to spy on other countries AND American citizens. It is the only possible reason the government would justify spending so much money. And, as George Carlin says, don't trust ANYTHING the government tells you. Basically, you can trust that the opposite is true.
We already have these on the moon. They just haven't told anyone yet. Duh.
There's already a company that is working on this: http://kickstarterr.com/projects/16653567/moon-computing/