To infinity and beyond, with a swarm of tiny computers costing under $1K each
(2023/07/26)
- Reference: 1690372751
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/07/26/linux_in_space/
- Source link:
Boffins believe the future of space exploration may belong to small, affordable probes sailing away under the Sun's power.
In [1]a pre-print paper titled, "BLISS: Interplanetary Exploration with Swarms of Low-Cost Spacecraft," authors Alexander Alvara, Lydia Lee, Emmanuel Sin, Nathan Lambert, Andrew Westphal, and Kristofer Pister outline a project that aims to go where no one has gone before with a fleet of cheap, tiny Linux-powered spacecraft.
"The BLISS project is intended to demonstrate that cellphone technologies and other miniaturization via technological advancements enable unprecedented capabilities in space," the authors, affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, state in their paper.
[2]
BLISS spacecraft, each with a mass of about 10 grams, are smaller than a 10 cm 3 1.33 kg (3 lb) [3]CubeSat . The BLISS design depicts a circuit board joined with a solar panel to form a T-shape, towed by a significantly larger solar sail with an additional "roll sail" to provide rotate the craft.
[4]
[5]
These spacecraft, projected to cost less than $1,000 each, consist of: a 1 m 2 square mylar sail; micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) motors for sail control; an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for rotation sensing; a laser transmitter and a single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) optical receiver; a highly-oriented pyrolytic graphite ( [6]HOPG ) radiator fin for thermal control; a lithium-polymer battery; an iPhone camera; a [7]VoCore2 PC running Linux and custom software; and Alta solar cells.
Regular Reg readers will know Linux has gone into space before: for example, on the [8]International Space Station , and on [9]Mars . And SpaceX uses a [10]custom Linux distro in its Starlink internet broadband satellites.
Larger solar sail-powered spacecraft are difficult to build, costly, and tend to entail missions on the order of a dozen years due to the transit times involved, the authors argue. Even CubeSats, they say, require hundreds of square metres of sail area to provide useful propulsion.
For a 10 gram spacecraft, a 1 m 2 solar sail presents the most practical propulsion option, and the BLISS design, they claim, would work well at scale. A fleet of a thousand would weigh only 10 kilograms and the stack of sails to power them forwards would be only a few millimeters thick.
[11]James Webb spots water vapor in rocky planet-forming disk
[12]Amazon sets up shop at Kennedy Space Center to prep Kuiper broadband satellites
[13]NASA's DART kicked up swarm of 37 boulders after Dimorphos asteroid crash
[14]Weird radio pulses could be coming from new type of stellar object
The Berkeley boffins suggest a suitable initial mission would be imaging somewhere between ten and a few hundred near-Earth objects (NEOs).
"There are roughly 20,000 known NEOs, roughly 1,000 of which are believed to be asteroids greater than 1 km in diameter," they note. "Only 10 of these NEOs have been visited by spacecraft."
Modeling a trip to [15]Bennu – a near-Earth asteroid [16]visited in 2020 by NASA's Osiris-REx spacecraft – the space scientists estimate BLISS ships could complete a round-trip mission in just over 5.1 years (1,866 days).
[17]
The Osiris-REx mission took just over seven years (2,572 days) and samples [18]are due back on Earth on this September. The mission will have cost an estimated $1.2bn when completed.
After completing a NEO visit test run, the BLISS team proposes collecting material from thousands of Jupiter-family comets using the spacecraft. They observe that the most recent US [19]Planetary Decadal Survey identified fetching comet samples as a high priority mission, but could not be completed until the mid-2040s using an approach proposed in the New Frontiers competition. With a swarm of 10 gram BLISS craft, they insist the mission could be completed within the next decade.
As for radiation shielding, BLISS aims to hope for the best. "The BLISS mass budget does not allow for sufficient shielding to have a significant impact on the dose hitting the electronics," the authors state. "Still, carefully-designed electronics should be able to survive a multi-year mission with sufficient probability."
[20]
And if not, perhaps it's worth sacrificing a few inexpensive Linux machines for the sake of science. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11226
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cubesats/overview
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/strg/early-stage-innovations-esi/esi2021/Advanced_Lightweight_Heat_Rejection_Radiators_for_Space_Nuclear_Power/
[7] https://vocore.io/v2u.html
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2013/05/10/iss_linux_debian_deployment/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/19/perseverance_computing_feature/
[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/gxb7j1/comment/ft66thc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/25/water_vapour_jwst/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/22/amazon_kuiper_station/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/21/dart_dimorphos_ejection/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/20/magnetars/
[15] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/asteroids/101955-bennu/overview/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/bennu_core_nasa/
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/nasas_asteroid_sample/
[19] https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/planetary-science-and-astrobiology-decadal-survey-2023-2032
[20] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
In [1]a pre-print paper titled, "BLISS: Interplanetary Exploration with Swarms of Low-Cost Spacecraft," authors Alexander Alvara, Lydia Lee, Emmanuel Sin, Nathan Lambert, Andrew Westphal, and Kristofer Pister outline a project that aims to go where no one has gone before with a fleet of cheap, tiny Linux-powered spacecraft.
"The BLISS project is intended to demonstrate that cellphone technologies and other miniaturization via technological advancements enable unprecedented capabilities in space," the authors, affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, state in their paper.
[2]
BLISS spacecraft, each with a mass of about 10 grams, are smaller than a 10 cm 3 1.33 kg (3 lb) [3]CubeSat . The BLISS design depicts a circuit board joined with a solar panel to form a T-shape, towed by a significantly larger solar sail with an additional "roll sail" to provide rotate the craft.
[4]
[5]
These spacecraft, projected to cost less than $1,000 each, consist of: a 1 m 2 square mylar sail; micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) motors for sail control; an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for rotation sensing; a laser transmitter and a single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) optical receiver; a highly-oriented pyrolytic graphite ( [6]HOPG ) radiator fin for thermal control; a lithium-polymer battery; an iPhone camera; a [7]VoCore2 PC running Linux and custom software; and Alta solar cells.
Regular Reg readers will know Linux has gone into space before: for example, on the [8]International Space Station , and on [9]Mars . And SpaceX uses a [10]custom Linux distro in its Starlink internet broadband satellites.
Larger solar sail-powered spacecraft are difficult to build, costly, and tend to entail missions on the order of a dozen years due to the transit times involved, the authors argue. Even CubeSats, they say, require hundreds of square metres of sail area to provide useful propulsion.
For a 10 gram spacecraft, a 1 m 2 solar sail presents the most practical propulsion option, and the BLISS design, they claim, would work well at scale. A fleet of a thousand would weigh only 10 kilograms and the stack of sails to power them forwards would be only a few millimeters thick.
[11]James Webb spots water vapor in rocky planet-forming disk
[12]Amazon sets up shop at Kennedy Space Center to prep Kuiper broadband satellites
[13]NASA's DART kicked up swarm of 37 boulders after Dimorphos asteroid crash
[14]Weird radio pulses could be coming from new type of stellar object
The Berkeley boffins suggest a suitable initial mission would be imaging somewhere between ten and a few hundred near-Earth objects (NEOs).
"There are roughly 20,000 known NEOs, roughly 1,000 of which are believed to be asteroids greater than 1 km in diameter," they note. "Only 10 of these NEOs have been visited by spacecraft."
Modeling a trip to [15]Bennu – a near-Earth asteroid [16]visited in 2020 by NASA's Osiris-REx spacecraft – the space scientists estimate BLISS ships could complete a round-trip mission in just over 5.1 years (1,866 days).
[17]
The Osiris-REx mission took just over seven years (2,572 days) and samples [18]are due back on Earth on this September. The mission will have cost an estimated $1.2bn when completed.
After completing a NEO visit test run, the BLISS team proposes collecting material from thousands of Jupiter-family comets using the spacecraft. They observe that the most recent US [19]Planetary Decadal Survey identified fetching comet samples as a high priority mission, but could not be completed until the mid-2040s using an approach proposed in the New Frontiers competition. With a swarm of 10 gram BLISS craft, they insist the mission could be completed within the next decade.
As for radiation shielding, BLISS aims to hope for the best. "The BLISS mass budget does not allow for sufficient shielding to have a significant impact on the dose hitting the electronics," the authors state. "Still, carefully-designed electronics should be able to survive a multi-year mission with sufficient probability."
[20]
And if not, perhaps it's worth sacrificing a few inexpensive Linux machines for the sake of science. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11226
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cubesats/overview
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/strg/early-stage-innovations-esi/esi2021/Advanced_Lightweight_Heat_Rejection_Radiators_for_Space_Nuclear_Power/
[7] https://vocore.io/v2u.html
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2013/05/10/iss_linux_debian_deployment/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/19/perseverance_computing_feature/
[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/gxb7j1/comment/ft66thc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/25/water_vapour_jwst/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/22/amazon_kuiper_station/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/21/dart_dimorphos_ejection/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/20/magnetars/
[15] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/asteroids/101955-bennu/overview/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/bennu_core_nasa/
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/nasas_asteroid_sample/
[19] https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/planetary-science-and-astrobiology-decadal-survey-2023-2032
[20] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMFDJmaVQCMDVQoSxcfG0gAAA9E&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Von Neumann Effect
Spamfast
Don't forget to equip them with the ability to self-replicate.
Berserker Base here we come. (Or Mantrid Drones if you prefer.)
Re: Von Neumann Effect
RockBurner
Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Object anyone?
(Mine's the one with the pen terminal in the pocket).
Re: Von Neumann Effect
b0llchit
The return of the army of V'Ger?
Berkeley Distribution going far
midgepad
A good Standard, that.
prandeamus
"You will be assimilated into BLISS. Resistance is futile."
BLISS : Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail
Howard Sway
Good job they didn't call it the Berkeley Spaceship Distribution.
If they only cost $1000 each, why not offer to let people pay $1000 to have their name and face engraved on one before it sets off to the wild black yonder and cover the costs? I reckon loads of people would sign up for this.
It might be a bad idea though, if the thing got stuck in the interstellar gas take-in port of an alien spaceship. They would know who to blame when they came angrily looking for revenge.
Reminds me of when we learned the mars rovers were using beefed up apple G3 processors - forget what they were called. Not the fastest but very reliable.