Space Station getting tech help

Some 250 miles above the Earth, reliability is more prized than speed or power.

But soon the International Space Station, which has been tooling along with outdated but trustworthy computers, will have a potent and fast addition as Hewlett Packard Enterprise boots up its new offering.

HPE, which is moving its headquarters to Spring in 2022, sent its Spaceborne Computer-2 into microgravity to help accelerate research, such as DNA sequencing or pulling insights from data collected by satellites, and to lay the groundwork for trips deeper into space.

“It’s like going from iPhone 1 to iPhone 12,” said Mark Fernandez, HPE’s principal investigator for Spaceborne Computer-2. “There isn’t anything onboard the space station that has nearly the compute capability that we do.”

The HPE computer was launched into space Saturday from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It was among 8,000 pounds of science investigations and cargo tucked inside a Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply spacecraft.

This spacecraft reached the International Space Station on Monday, and Fernandez expects the computer will be operational in early March.

Spaceborne Computer-2 is the second system sent into space by HPE. Its predecessor, Spaceborne Computer, was launched in 2017 to prove off-the-shelf hardware can survive the rigors of space. It used software coding to monitor for radiation-caused errors and then self-correct when errors were identified.

In contrast, most computers are “hardened” before being launched into microgravity. They have electronics specifically designed to survive higher levels of

radiation, and they have packaging that provides protection from the shake, rattle and roll of liftoff.

Such computers can cost $200,000, Fernandez said. Spaceborne Computer-2, which is not hardened for space, costs less than $20,000.

The HPE computer will be available on the space station for the next two or three years.

“Spaceborne Computer-2 provides a powerful on-board computer for space station researchers,” Bryan Dansberry, associate program scientist for the International Space Station Research Integration Office, said in an email. “Scientists previously had to either integrate their own dedicated computer into their experiment hardware, transmit data to the ground for analysis, or store

data on a hard drive and wait for it to be physically returned to the ground months later aboard a spacecraft.”

He said computers on the space station are used to monitor and maintain essential systems, in the event ground communications are lost, and to support experiments being conducted in orbit. They were chosen more for reliability than computational capabilities.

As such, Fernandez said these onboard computers aren’t powerful enough to process large amounts of data. As Dansberry indicated, the ISS computers collect data and then send that data to Earth where more powerful computers extract insights.

Due to the file size of raw data, it can take hours to weeks to send this information to Earth.

Spaceborne Computer-2 will be able to process data from the International Space Station, obtain

the needed insights and then just send the useful information down to Earth in significantly smaller files. Smaller files don’t take as long to travel.

For example, an Earth-observing camera taking an hour of 4K ultra-high-definition video might produce a 100 GB file. With current ISS computers, Fernandez said this could take up to 1/3 of a month to download to Earth. Depending on the processing required, HPE anticipates Spaceborne Computer-2 will reduce that to less than a day.

Similarly, a 725 MB human genome data file could currently take up to 2½ hours to transmit to Earth — that’s without processing the data. Spaceborne Computer-2 could process the data in space in roughly 10 minutes and then send the processed data to Earth in about 1 minute.

“You don’t want the raw data,” Fernandez said. “You want the results.”

This capability will become especially important as humans travel farther from Earth. There was an 11½ minute one-way lag in communications when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last week.

“As exploration missions move further out into the solar system, communication delays make relying on Earth-bound computing impractical,” Dansberry said. “On the moon, those delays will be measured in seconds, but on Mars they grow to many minutes. Future exploration missions must be able to take all the computing power they will need with them.”

Dansberry said Spaceborne Computer-2 will inform NASA’s planning for on-board computing as it seeks to reach the moon and Mars.