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Looking At the Hardware and Software of NASA's New Horizons (imgtec.com)
alexvoica writes: Last week we learnt that Pluto has blue skies and ice water thanks to a series of high-resolution images provided by the New Horizons probe. But how is the probe taking these photographs and sending them back to NASA? What hardware and software systems are inside and who built them? Luckily, the New Horizons engineering team kindly answered these questions (and many others) in a detailed interview.
Here are some fun facts from my discussion with the engineers. The chipset: It might sound strange to some but NASA used to be a chip maker. Before using standard MIPS or Intel CPUs for probes like New Horizons, NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel. Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece and built using a grant from the Goddard Space Flight Center. The camera: New Horizons has a multispectral 1 megapixel camera; sending a single 1200 x 900 image back to earth takes approximately 3-4 hours. The comms: Forget 4G LTE, New Horizons uses the very best! The probe relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls. DSN is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecom system in the world and was also used to guide the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission back to earth. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon remain forever grateful. The memory: New Horizons includes 16GB of flash memory which provides plenty of storage space for photos and other scientific data. The operating system: New Horizons runs on Nucleus, a popular operating system designed by Mentor Graphics. Coincidentally, Nucleus is also at the heart of the ARTIK 1 platform for IoT launched by Samsung only a few months ago.
Here are some fun facts from my discussion with the engineers. The chipset: It might sound strange to some but NASA used to be a chip maker. Before using standard MIPS or Intel CPUs for probes like New Horizons, NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel. Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece and built using a grant from the Goddard Space Flight Center. The camera: New Horizons has a multispectral 1 megapixel camera; sending a single 1200 x 900 image back to earth takes approximately 3-4 hours. The comms: Forget 4G LTE, New Horizons uses the very best! The probe relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls. DSN is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecom system in the world and was also used to guide the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission back to earth. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon remain forever grateful. The memory: New Horizons includes 16GB of flash memory which provides plenty of storage space for photos and other scientific data. The operating system: New Horizons runs on Nucleus, a popular operating system designed by Mentor Graphics. Coincidentally, Nucleus is also at the heart of the ARTIK 1 platform for IoT launched by Samsung only a few months ago.
relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls.
Good to see the alliance with Bajor is paying dividends.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
In the dawn of Silicon Valley the fabs counted on NASA and Military orders. For quite a long time they could count on 70+% of the production going towards NASA and military contracts. Almost no one else could afford the products at the time. Eventually Intel broke that mold by making a huge bet that they could slash the product costs and a wave of volume would follow to make the price point profitable. It was a huge risk.
Seriously, what the fuck is going on there?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Because the shielding you are thinking of does nothing in space. Radiation hardening BTW has nothing to do with shielding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
love is just extroverted narcissism
we sha 'nuff did.
corporate welfare. For the price of one of those CPUs, we could provide nearly a thousand months of WIC. Of course, CONservatives would rather starve a child than give-up their welfare.
"shielded, shock mounted enclosures" aren't going to do anything against 1+ GeV protons.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
He speech real sofistacated-like.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
A decade ago I spent about two years on an embedded system running Nucleus, spent several months fixing bugs in the threading primitives, including the core spin-lock mutex that worked about 99.999% of the time under low-load conditions, but whose failure rate rose rapidly with load to about 2%. So much fun. Parts of that codebase looked like they were written by very low skill programmers.
Why not just use an off-the-shelf processor and put the PCBs in shielded, shock mounted enclosures?
Several reasons. 1) Weight matters. Adding shielding and enclosures adds weight and thus cost. Sometimes the cost of the component is dwarfed by the cost to launch said component. 2) Off the shelf hardware doesn't always work for applications like these for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's fine but not always. 3) A lot of this stuff was developed a LONG time ago and has to work with a lot of legacy systems. Off the shelf solutions don't always work for some of the problems they face. 4) Once they have a proven design, it is a non-trivial task to get a new piece of hardware qualified.
Radiation shielding in space is harder than you might think. You can't just add a thin lead sheet or other dense material around critical circuits and be done. When photons get above a certain energy level, they pretty much blast through anything dense. What you really need for shielding for those types of high energy photons is a _really_ thick layer of low density shielding, say several miles of a gas under about 1 atmosphere of pressure. But this is simply not practical on today's spacecraft. There are other approaches to shielding such as layering high and low density materials, but in a spacecraft shielding is always limited by volume and mass constraints.
The other option is to deal with radiation by building chips with redundancy. The idea is that if one part of the circuit gets temporarily zapped, two other parts are still functional and the majority is probably the correct answer. You also build the electronics so that if everything goes south they can reboot and recover.
NASA knows what they are doing here!
If by "very thick shielding" you mean a meter of concrete....
There's good reason that they use radiation-hardened processors on space probes. Shielding is an impractical way to deal with the problem.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
The "space pen vs pencil" is a fallacy. Read about the real history where NASA did not invent the zero-g pen, but an entrepreneur did: http://www.woot.com/blog/post/...
-1 Idiotic and Stupid.
NASA never spent any money on a pen, the Fisher pen company decided to make a "space pen" all by themselves using private capital. The pen was adopted by NASA, and later by the Soviets/Russians. Pencils are dangerous in space "because of the substantial dangers that broken pencil tips and graphite dust pose to electronics in zero gravity, the flammable nature of wood present in pencils, and the inadequate quality documentation produced by non-permanent or smeared recordkeeping".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Btw since some people take that joke seriously, here's what actually happened :
NASA spent dozens of dollars buying pens built to write upside down. After selling a handful of "upside down" pens to NASA, the company started marketing it as the "Space Pen".
Initially, the Russians had a problem with cosmonauts inhaling graphite dust as they wrote, until they too spent $20 on pens.
On the other hand, the AVERAGE time between when the federal government orders a PC until it's booted is 4 1/2 years. So they order (and pay for) new computers, which are mostly deprecated by the time they power on for the first time. These bureaucratic delays create an opportunity for suppliers. They get a contract at market price for current-gen computer specs, then years later deliver outdated and therefore cheaper equipment.
I'm curious what the development process is, especially for the software. It seems to me it would be very bad to have a bug show up while you're trying to image Pluto. It has to be reliable and bug-free, to the greatest extent possible. What techniques and processes are used to have a high degree of confidence that the code they are developing is absolutely correct? Are some of those processes applicable to other types of software development, in which finding and fixing bugs is expensive, though not nearly as expensive?
It is a myth. But the myth is grounded on real differences in approaches between the Soviets and the US at the time. Two examples:
I had a friend who went as part of a US military team as a translator during one of those mutual nuclear disarmament treaties in the 80s. The Soviets had sent their own team to the US. Each team was allowed to inspect any area large enough to conceal a "treaty-limited item", which was carefully laid out in the treaty. So the US team was sent over with laser measuring devices to figure out what they could inspect and what they couldn't. The Soviets thought the devices were really clever. What their teams had been sent over with was... a stick. If the stick fit, they could inspect it.
Another example: in the US, you know how if you get pulled over (at least at the time), the police officer would take your license back to the police car, key the number into a computer or radio it to someone who would key it in, this would look up the number in a central database for existing violations (letting them know if they needed to for example take the license away), then it'd register the new violation in the database, the officer would then get all the info, print up or write up the ticket using that, and hand the license back, right? The Soviet system was a bit... simpler. The officer would take your license and punch a hole in it. If you had too many holes, they'd keep it. ;)
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
A couple of things to consider
1: For certain types of radiation shielding can actually make things worse. Very high energy particles tend to go right through matter without interacting at all but when they *do* hit something they can create a storm of lower energy particles. Sometimes these particles can have a higher probability of causing problems than the original high energy particle did.
2: Getting mass out of the gravity well is expensive. $40K may seem like a lot to us mere mortals but it's trivial compared to the cost of sending even a few kilos on a trajectory out of the solar system.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
What would be the outcome of just using a smart phone? One could offer an H1B visa to anyone that has an app for operating the phone-camera remotely. And purchase the phone in Peking. The outcome would be the entire Indian population would move to Irvine, and the Long Distance charges would cancel out the U.S.'s debt to China; it's a win-win-win scenario.
really? i thought the soviet (and now Russian) worked like this: Officer pulls you over, and then they take all the rubles in your wallet. If this sum wasn't sufficient, then they'd punch holes in you, and/or take you (to Siberia).