
What the plan for a solar storm?
NASA has suggested that radiation caused a computer malfunction on the International Space Station. Wednesday’s daily station report from the ISS mentioned that the Crew-1 Dragon spacecraft parked at the space station “experienced an unexpected wakeup triggered by false ISS emergency alarms caused by erroneous data from the …
I think (but not sure so feel free to correct!) that the ISS is low enough that it is protected by the Earth's magnetic field for the majority of solar issues. I don't know if it is clear whether this incident was Solar or Cosmic radiation though. And obviously, such protection just reduces the incidence, not stops it altogether.
If I recall correctly, although there is an increased risk from long term spaceflight (even in the relatively low altitude ISS), the only time that specific events (such as Solar flares) have needed to be considered was for the Moon missions where the astronauts were outside the magnetically protected zone. I don't recall that any special consideration was given to the electronics but as it was significantly "chunkier" back then (yup, technical term, that is) it may well have been much less sensitive to such things!
I know that solar flares can be an issue for satellites (but not sure whether that is all of them or whether geo-stationary are more at risk, being further out). But, as shown here, computer systems can get messed up by a single bit flip whereas lifeforms are a bit more resistant (but not invulnerable) to similar events.
Nowadays we have some early warning, early enough that very worst case if a bad solar flare heads our way they can jump into their vessels (Soyuz and/or Dragon) and get within the atmosphere before it reaches us.
In less bad cases they take shelter in the more protected parts of the station and ride it out.
Such events are not entirely unprecedented: https://www.rt.com/news/402946-iss-shelter-solar-flare/
There are different types of radiation. High-energy protons generally don't affect electronics as much as secondary radiation like electrons etc. It is actually safer (in space) to be in a thin-shelled vehicle as a thicker steel wall will produce a particle shower.
I believe that radiation hardened ICs are available. They are made by over doping the transistors. You won't get the density of a modern CPU but it will survive much more radiation.
"The ISS isn't in low grav at all. It's only a few hundred miles up. Gravity up there is only about 10% lower than it is down here."
But the ISS does not meet the equal and opposite pushing back part of the equation that we have down here, so the picture is not quite complete.
An unusual (to me) use of an imperial weight unit to describe a volume of liquid, allowing even for left pondian foibles it seems odd as they usually go for quarts, cups or ounces.
Here in Medioleftpondia, US customary units of mass are used for liquids in certain circumstances, e.g. the hundredweight (100 pounds avoirdupois = 45.359237 kg), in which minimum farm prices for raw milk are specified by the US Department of Agriculture.
"unless we are in Quebec when we use Kg, unless we don't feel like it and so use pounds - the difference doesn't really matter anyway"
Wasn;t there a case of a passenger aircraft taking off without the fuel to reach it's destination because of exactly that difference? ie they asked for fuel in Kg and had it pumped in lbs.
What will they think of next, hamster-powered generators?
I suppose in space it all comes down to a weight/energy ratio - if it's one hamster to the kWh but 2.5 cats then the cat reactor wins ... but if porcines are 3.5 kWh then we'll have PIGS IN SPAAAAACCCEEE!
Keep mew-ving along ...
I'm reminded of when a colleague opened a piece of land-based kit and found a PCB full of a chip we didn't recognise at all. After a quick search we discovered it was the radiation hardened version of a chip that would likely be used in this application. We wondered why they would use chips that potentially cost hundreds of time the amount. The best conclusion was that they were surplus product that never made it into space and they got them for a song.
Which makes me think that as chip fabrication processes grow smaller, surely the energy to flip one bit becomes smaller too, meaning more bits will get flipped.
Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storage appliances, and that the device worked as advertised.
The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state disk – a pair of VCPUs and 4GB of RAM. The latter two components mean the Snowcone can run either EC2 instances or apps written with AWS’s Greengrass IoT product. In either case, the idea is that you take a Snowcone into out-of-the-way places where connectivity is limited, collect data in situ and do some pre-processing on location. Once you return to a location where bandwidth is plentiful, it's assumed you'll upload the contents of a Snowcone into AWS and do real work on it there.
NASA engineers had to work fast to avoid another leak affecting the latest Artemis dry run, just hours after an attempt to reboost the International Space Station (ISS) via the Cygnus freighter was aborted following a few short seconds.
The US space agency on Monday rolled the huge Artemis I stack back to its Florida launchpad having worked through the leaks and problems that had beset its previous attempt at fueling the beast in April for an earlier dress rehearsal of the final countdown.
As propellant was loaded into the rocket, controllers noted a hydrogen leak in the quick-disconnect that attaches an umbilical from the tail service mast on the mobile launcher to the core stage of the rocket.
Two and a half years after its first disastrous launch, Boeing has once again fired its CST-100 Starliner capsule at the International Space Station.
This time it appeared to go well, launching at 18:54 ET from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. The RD-180 main engine and twin solid rocket boosters of the Atlas V performed as planned before Starliner was pushed to near orbital velocity by the Centaur upper stage.
After separation from the Centaur, Starliner fired its own thrusters for orbital insertion and is on course for the ISS. Docking is scheduled for approximately 19:10 ET today (23:10 UTC).
A retired NASA astronaut and three space tourists are right now tucked inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule above Earth for the first-ever purely commercial mission to the International Space Station.
Flames billowed from the sky as the four-person crew were carried into space by a Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 8 at 1117 ET (1517 UTC). They are expected to arrive at their destination on Saturday at 1054 ET (1454 UTC) if all goes to plan.
Michael Lopéz-Alegría, vice president of business development at Axiom Space and a former NASA astronaut, is flying on the first private flight. He is accompanied by Larry Connor, an American real estate magnate; Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli businessman and former fighter pilot; and Mark Pathy, Canadian CEO of investment firm Maverick.
Video From the department of "we've got this supercomputer on the space station, what shall we do with it?" comes news of AI technology being used to check the gloves of spacewalkers.
Wear and tear is a problem for astronauts venturing out of the orbiting lab, and while helmets filling with water may have garnered all the headlines, decades of grabbing for handrails and maneuvering equipment takes its toll on gloves.
The gloves have five layers – a rubberized coating, followed by a cut-resistant material called Vectran then three further layers to keep the person inside at just the right temperature and pressure. Problems come when wear reaches the Vectran layer, for beyond that lies the pressure bladder and a bit further, the squishy human.
Today marks 21 years since Russia's space station, Mir, returned to Earth.
As the rhetoric from Russian space agency Roscosmos intensifies, it is worth taking a look back at the deorbit of the Mir complex, the first components of which were launched during the Soviet era.
Assembly of the International Space Station (ISS) was well under way when Mir met its demise. Indeed, it was Russia's commitment to the ISS that ended the veteran station; funding simply did not exist to keep both programs running.
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth today aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule and accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts.
Vande Hei's 355-day mission is the longest single spaceflight for a NASA astronaut, comfortably eclipsing the 340 days of Scott Kelly's mission from 2015 to 2016.
Kelly's interactions with Roscosmos boss Dmitry Rogozin on Twitter are a reminder that Vande Hei has returned to a changed world. The International Space Station (ISS) is pretty much the last example of global cooperation in space (at least as far as Russia is concerned).
While scientists celebrated the successful launch and ongoing deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA had another thing to bring cheer in the new year – the extension of the International Space Station (ISS) from 2025 through 2030.
The announcement, through a NASA blog and US Vice President Kamala Harris on Twitter, commits to extend ISS operations through 2030, though it did not mention what, if any, additional funds would be made available to keep the ageing laboratory aloft.
NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) continues to suffer delays, the latest being an issue with one of the RS-25 engine flight controllers necessitating a replacement, although the agency continues to eye launch opportunities in the first half of 2022. The SLS is impressively over-budget and NASA has only so much taxpayer cash to spread around.
Space Entertainment Enterprise (SEE), a UK-based media company, has commissioned Axiom Space in Texas to build an inflatable space station module for orbital media production.
On Thursday, the media firm, which claims to be working on "the first ever Hollywood motion picture filmed in outer space," reportedly involving Tom Cruise, said it has hired Axiom Space to create SEE-1.
SEE-1 is envisioned as a media production module that will "allow artists, producers, and creatives to develop, produce, record, and live stream content which maximizes the Space Station’s low-orbit microgravity environment, including films, television, music and sports events."
A double helping of plastic playtime this Monday as we honour the achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope by building one out of Lego and an ESA astronaut takes some Playmobil on a tour of the ISS.
Having constructed many examples of spacecraft and their infrastructure, the unfolding of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and its successful insertion into L2 orbit seemed as good an excuse as any to raid the boxes of plastic bricks once more in tribute to the observatory and the brains behind it.
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