Just yesterday, during a dinner with friends, the topic of the space conquest And as it seems that many of the space agencies from different countries and continents are coming together to get much farther, even the occasional one dares with certain commercial agreements with different private companies that, today, are the ones that truly seem willing to go where it is necessary to achieve this goal.
Within this topic, of course, they talked about technology and the enormous number of devices that still have to be developed for this type of trip to be feasible and, personally, I have to admit that it caught my attention that some of the present in the conversation, despite seeming 'quite put'in the subject and very interested they did not know that, for example, a computer that is taken to space, at the hardware level, it is very different from the ones we use on Earth, among other things because they have to withstand space radiation.
BAE Systems is the company behind the development of the RAD5545 computer
A clear example of this we have in one of the latest prototypes created by the company BAE Systems, a company that with the passage of time has finally specialized in the development and manufacture of computers and processors that are finally installed in many of the ships that finally fly through space and even in the satellites that orbit our planet, hence she was chosen to talk about one of her computers.
As the title of this post says, today we will focus on the RAD5545, a computer specially designed to work with him in outer space and that stands out, above all, for being able to withstand the radiation from cosmic rays and other sources, one of the main concerns when developing one of these teams since it achieves degrade all your electronic components very quickly, as well as offering sufficient performance and resistance to be embarked on any interplanetary mission.
As stated by BAE Systems, radiation is precisely one of the main obstacles that this company must face, which in turn forces its designers and engineers to develop a very special way of manufacturing these components so that they are able to survive such special conditions that do not occur on Earth and that could cause a ship's systems to end up completely failing.
For the RAD5545 a unique insulation system had to be designed
Going into a little more detail, the RAD5545 has been equipped with hardware that consists of a single board or SBC that, according to the specifications published by its own manufacturer, is capable of providing the ideal performance in terms of processing capacity to a next generation ship, which will be in charge of carrying out future missions of meteorological exploration, communications, surveillance, security ...
In addition to the above, to protect itself from space radiation, the RAD5545 has been equipped with a very special insulation system for each of its chips, bipolar integrated circuits with one of the highest radiation tolerances that as humans we have been able to reach, magnetoresistive RAM or MRAM for non-volatile memories, special titanium shielding for the components and even a novel boron shielding system for the chips.
We are facing the space computer with the greatest computational capacity of the moment
As a final detail, as commented in the published press release, at the moment the RAD5545 space computer manufactured by the specialist BAE System, as a result of the tests carried out and the analysis of the results obtained, is one of the specially designed equipment to work in outer space with higher computational performance, data storage capacity and bandwidth manufactured to date by human beings.
Thanks to these qualities, to date, we are facing one of the best computer systems capable of working in outer space, especially if we consider that, in terms of software, this computer is capable of work very smoothly with multiple operating systems, high resolution images and even provide simultaneous support for multiple payloads.
Further information: New Atlas