Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 09:17:18 +0900 (JST) From: Brian Handy <handy@isass0.solar.isas.ac.jp> To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hardware in space? Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.4.05.10006220859440.4383-100000@isass0.solar.isas.ac.jp> In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000621233928.026e05c0@mail.rz.fh-wilhelmshaven.de>
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Wow! What a great dose of information! Thanks everyone! I've got a bunch of information, and a handful of people to respond to... so stand by, those of you who know who you are. Anyway, a couple of clarifications since I stirred up so much interest: - This is only the proposal stage of the instrument. The way NASA works is every year they make "Announcements of Opportunity", which is a thingy that invites us to write proposals to do work. There are lots of various categories of this, from data analysis of Solar Flares to theoretical consideration of pulsar evolution to proposing new instruments for the Next Generation Space Telescope. If we win, we'd start working on this sometime next year, probably, with a launch slated for about 3 years after that. - The sounding rocket environment isn't quite as bad as it sounds. The computer will be grounded to the chassis, but this doesn't mean it's going to get real cold. We've only got 5 minutes above the atmosphere, and I think it'd take a fair bit longer than that to get cold enough to matter. There's a group at Stanford that's taken this to an extreme: http://aa.stanford.edu/~ssdl/ These guys are trying to get to where they can turn a satellite into a senior thesis project for a student. (I don't think they've gotten it down to a year yet, though.) Basically they're working on the level of re-inventing Sputnik. Amazing stuff, amazingly simple, teaches people a bunch. Way below the level of sophistication I have to aim for, unfortunately. I'm told some of their electronics parts come from Radio Shack! :-) -- While getting too cold probably isn't an issue, COOLING certainly is. As a few people have alluded to, cooling in space becomes an issue because there's no air. This will be a problem much earlier, because we'll evacuate the payload several hours before launch. If there's a delay, the package could wind up sitting on the launch rail for a few days under vacuum. I've worried about blowing the top off the CPU from the heat. I imagine it'll probably have to be heat-sunk to the chassis in some manner. Someone mentioned using a 486; that's not such a bad idea. Mostly I'm just grabbing data from the RS-232 ports and stuffing it to disk, so I'll probably wind up doing some experimentation to see just what I'll need. Thanks, Brian [Reporting in from Japan] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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