Materials on the International Space Station Experiment
The International Space Station (ISS) is being used as a test-bed platform to help break the data logjam from Earth-orbiting satellites.
NASA’s “Materials on the International Space Station Experiment” (MISSE) program, under the direction of the Naval Research Laboratory, provides opportunities for low-risk, quick and inexpensive flight tests of materials and equipment in space aboard the ISS.
Once such experiment is focused on how to better handle the huge “waterfall” of information transmitted back to Earth from spacecraft.
The problem? Increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their available bandwidth can easily transmit.
The solution? Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre-reduce the large data stream.
The key is how well the latest in computing electronics would fare in the harsh environment of outer space.
True on-orbit data
The seventh in an ongoing series of MISSE flights — MISSE 7 — for the first time offered researchers power and data connections provided by the ISS from which to run actively powered experiments.
Back in November 2009, MISSE 7 equipment was manually deployed by spacewalking astronauts on the exterior of the ISS. Researchers at Sandia have been receiving data from this research payload ever since.
The Sandia experiments are providing insights into the effects of high-energy radiation on these computing electronics, enabling mitigation of these potentially crippling effects in future processing-architecture designs.
“We’re getting true on-orbit data from a space environment,” said Dave Bullington, Sandia’s lead engineer on the experiment taking place in low Earth orbit. “Data messages are being sent back every four minutes.”
At the heart of these new computing architectures are powerful yet flexible computing chips, configurable to support different missions. These chips are called reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays or FPGAs for short.
MISSE 8 is expected to launch on the space shuttle in July 2010.
When it is deployed on the ISS, it will replace the MISSE 7 Passive Experiment Containers, which will be returned to earth on the shuttle, allowing Sandia researchers to analyze SEUXSE hardware after being in orbit.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Sandia’s main facilities are located in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Livermore, California.
By LD/CSE