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Date:      Wed, 21 Jun 2000 13:18:18 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Essenz Consulting <john@essenz.com>
To:        Brian Handy <handy@lambic.physics.montana.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Hardware in space?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.10006211313410.50107-100000@athena.lightningone.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006210103060.33677-100000@lambic.physics.montana.edu>

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Brain,

For a hard drive, you can look at solid state FLASH disks. They make FLASH
IDE "Hard Drives" which connect to a motherboards IDE channel. Drive is
not a drive but FLASH memory. However, I still am not sure if that would
be okay up in space. Also, I imagine temperatures will be very low, like
50 below ZERO. That may also cause a problem.

Doesnt sound like something you will be able to do with of the shelf
equipment.

-jve

On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Brian Handy wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've got some ideas that I could use some advise on.  Right now, I'm
> working on a Science, Research & Technology (SR&T) proposal that I'm going
> to be submitting to NASA with a group of folks here from Montana
> State.  We're going to propose to launch a solar telescope on what amounts
> to a missile body and look at the sun for 5 minutes or so.  (The total
> launch is about 10 minutes long, but we're only high enough in the
> atmosphere for 5 minutes or so.)
> 
> To get an idea of the sort of images we can make doing this, here's a
> sample URL:
> 
> http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000621.html
> 
> Anyway, in the past these payloads have always included simple (but
> painful) electronics packages that were basically home-brewed by the
> engineering teams that put them together.  I'm thinking that, what with
> the capabilities now available in a simple laptop motherboard I should be
> able to drive the whole payload with a laptop.  Question is, what should
> I use?  (My tentative OS plan, and my tenuous link to -hardware, is
> FreeBSD. :-)
> 
> So, food for thought: the hardware has to be vacuum compatible, so no
> electrolytic caps and probably no disk drives.  (Unless I package the
> drives in some sort of pressure vessel.)  The box will have to be able to
> talk to three CCD cameras, which I suspect will be talking over an RS-232
> link.  It will also have to talk to the rocket electronics, and a GPS card
> would be a nice addition.  (I know people who have launched their payloads
> from White Sands Missile Range, only never to see them again. :-)  We will
> download some small part of the imagery collected during the flight, the
> housekeepking telemetry (temperatures and such) and the position as
> indicated by the GPS.
> 
> I can easily enough make myself a scaled-down version of FreeBSD that has
> none of the extra dreck you'd expect with a full-blown distribution;
> PicoBSD has already solved many of those problems.  I'm a little concerned
> about saving the data -- I won't have enough telemetry during the flight
> to download all the data (all told, around 500 MBytes).  So that will need
> to be stored somehow; some sort of non-volatile memory would be nice.  
> Once it hits the ground, I have this idea that I'd plug my laptop via
> ethernet cable into the butt-end of the payload (while sitting in the
> sand, somewhere in the middle of WSMR) and download everything to disk.
> 
> It's clearly a bit of a hostile environment, but it seems like this should
> all be solved stuff.  I don't have to have flight qualified electronics on
> a sounding rocket, but the stuff should be able to function without
> benefit of air flowing around it -- special heat sinks would probably be
> in order.  Also curious what non-volatile memory is in this context.
> 
> Any suggestions?  Vendors?  Experts?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Brian
> --
> Brian Handy                             Mail:  handy@physics.montana.edu
> Department of Physics                   Phone: (406) 994-6317
> Montana State University                Fax:   (406) 994-4452
> 
> 
> 
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