Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 01:19:51 -0600 (MDT) From: Brian Handy <handy@lambic.physics.montana.edu> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Hardware in space? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006210103060.33677-100000@lambic.physics.montana.edu>
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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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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