Raspberry Pi In Space

mikejuk (1801200) writes "When British astronaut Tim Peake heads off to the International Space Station in November, 2015, he will be accompanied on his 6-month mission by two augmented Raspberry Pis, aka Astro Pis. The Astro Pi board is a Raspberry Pi HAT (short for Hardware Attached on Top), and provides a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer, as well as sensors for temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity. It also has a real time clock, LED display, and some push buttons — it sounds like the sort of addon that we could do with down here on earth as well! It will also be equipped with both a camera module and an infra-red camera. UK school pupils are being challenged to write Raspberry Pi apps or experiments to run in space. During his mission, Tim Peake will deploy the Astro Pis, upload the winning code while in orbit, set them running, collect the data generated and then download it to be distributed to the winning teams.

Comments

Re:Quick question

[Trepidity]

The ISS itself uses radiation-hardened computers, but these "AstroPI" are just using stock chips. The only thing different afaict is the custom peripheral board. I would guess the duration of the experiment, combined with it not really being a mission-critical part, makes radiation hardening not needed.

Hope he doesn't lose power

[gavron]

Pis are great.
But when the power drops.the filesystem on the SDcard is corrupt.
Then the Pi is dead with no hope of doing anything unless you brought a spare SDcard or something to mount/fsck/correct it with.

If I was going into space I'd take a Droid or an iPhone. That way I can play
Angry Birds In Space in space.

E

Re: Hope he doesn't lose power

[0100010001010011]

With as cheap as you can get memory these days why doesn't someone put 16 or 32 GB on the same board and a way to TFTP boot and stop making me deal with SD cards.

Re: Hope he doesn't lose power

[Maxmin]

I have never, ever seen this happen. I run mounted read-write, read-only, multiple partitions.

I run RPis off batteries, UPSes and dirty apartment building power with cheap Chinese power adapters. I've seen every combination of power loss during reads, writes, to primary or temporary fs.

Never ever seen corruption. I smell PEBKAC, as in your choice of sd card.

Re:Hope he doesn't lose power

[Bearhouse]

I'm sure there's a Burma Shave in there...

Re:Quick question

[ShanghaiBill]

but these "AstroPI" are just using stock chips.

With current technology, it is common for even stock chips to have some rad-hard features. For instance, many ICs are manufactured with depleted boron as a semiconductor dopant and in the borophosphosilicate glass insulating layer. This can dramatically reduce the number of soft errors, and adds little to the cost, since depleted boron is not particularly expensive, and only small quantities are needed. It is also possible to fix some problems in software, by running periodic checksums on blocks of memory.

Re:Cosmic Rays

[dougmc]

The ISS is well below the Van Allen radiation belts and well within the Earth's magnetic field (which deflects many of the charged particles headed towards the Earth) so the level of cosmic radiation it gets is not *that* high, and the metal of the ISS blocks most of of that.

And if a Raspberry Pi does get its registers corrupted by cosmic rays ... it's not a tragedy. Nobody dies -- it's not mission critical.

In any event, they use pretty standard (but old -- last I heard, they still ran Windows 95) laptops on the ISS and they work fine. It would be interesting to know how much more often they experience failures and errors on the ISS due to radiation compared to how much they experience here, but I don't know if anybody has measured that. (My guess is that NASA has, though I wouldn't know where to look for the data.)

Re:Cosmic Rays

[dougmc]

The reason they use older laptops is not because of the density of the chips but simply because they're known commodities -- any quirks they have have already been figured out and they get the job done. Getting anything certified (for mission critical purposes) is a very time consuming process, and once it's done ... the item is no longer state of the art, that's just the nature of the beast.

The Raspberry Pis don't have to go through the same certification process, though of course if they were expected to only work "for eight seconds" I think NASA would have told the people sending them up that to pick something older. I'm guessing that NASA knows a bit about the radiation environment up there and advises people who send up experiments appropriately.

And as others have said ... humans are living in the same environment for months at a time -- it can't be *that* bad.

Re:Astro pis...

[FreeRadicalX]

What, no "Pi in the sky" jokes? I'm disappointed.

Re:Quick question

[RockDoctor]

For instance, many ICs are manufactured with depleted boron as a semiconductor dopant and in the borophosphosilicate glass insulating layer.

Since you're talking about isotopically purifying a material, that's going to be a damned sight more expensive than normal-isotope-mix boron. You've got the relatively large mass difference working on your side - 7.7% mass difference (borane) compared to (238+6*19)/(235+6*19) = 0.08% difference (UF6) - but you're still looking at a pretty big job. Even simple heavy water is thousands of times more expensive than normal reagent grade water (11.8% mass difference for D2O versus H2O).

I hadn't thought about the (relative) reactivity of 10B from a radiation-sensitivity point of view. But we've been using it to date the exposure of rock surfaces to the sky for a couple of decades now, and a damned useful tool for archaeological and geomorphological studies it is too. It's up there with thermoluminescence for dating fire damage.