Often, advanced spacecraft run on shockingly old computer systems: Consider that Perseverance runs on a PowerPC 750 processor, the famous processor that powered iMacs in the late 1990s.
Based in San Francisco Athero SpaceX is aiming to bring more powerful computing systems to orbit, and its first payload will launch this month on the SpaceX Transporter-11 mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN and built on an Nvidia Orin processor, will be further shielded by a new radiation shielding material developed by the product’s developers. Cosmic Shielding Company (CSC), could help usher in a new era of computing in space.
Today, electronics in space are protected from harmful radiation in two ways. They are physically shielded, using a combination of materials like aluminum and tantalum, and they are radiation-hardened, which generally means they are designed in ways that increase their ability to withstand exposure to radiation. The AetherNxN computer is immune to radiation, but the addition of the CSC shield “allows us to bring AI-capable devices into space and operate them in these very hostile conditions,” Aethero co-founder Edward Gee said in a recent interview.
CSC’s shields are a new 3D-printed material the company calls Plasteel (a term dating back to Frank Herbert). Sand dunes): A blend of polymers with a uniformly distributed layer of radiation-blocking nanoparticles. The company was founded in 2020 and has launched its shielding materials on missions with Axiom Space and Quantum Space. Plasteel is more flexible than aluminum, allowing it to be used for a variety of components — the company is even working on adapting it for spacesuits.
The company says its material not only reduces the overall dose of radiation a computer receives, but is also more effective than conventional materials at reducing what are known as “single-event effects.” This occurs when a single ionizing particle, such as a high-energy proton, damages or otherwise affects an electronic circuit in space. (These events do happen on Earth, but they’re extremely rare because of the shielding provided by the atmosphere.)
While reducing the overall dose is important, mitigating the effects of an individual event is also vital. Yanni Barghouti, CSC’s co-founder and CEO, likened it to hitting 100 tennis balls against a wall versus a single bullet: they may have the same total kinetic energy, but the latter is significantly more dangerous.
Both GE and Barghouti agreed that next-generation security technologies will be essential to bringing advanced and complex processors into space. Aethero expects Its first and largest market Both companies see a new era of deep space exploration enabled by advanced edge computing in space.
“Nothing has ever been launched into space this fast from an AI standpoint before,” Barghouti said. “So doing this work the way it is being done is literally bringing Moore’s Law into space.”