Dr. Kathleen Morse, founder of Advanced Materials Applications, LLC (AMA) and CASIS sponsored principal investigator, is to speak at this weekend’s Citizen Astronaut and Space Hacker Workshop.

She will speak on AMA’s plans to evaluate the performance of Gumstix™ system on a chip in ground based and space based radiation studies.  Ground based radiation studies will take place at Crocker Nuclear Labs from July to December of this year.  Space based studies will occur on an external module of the International Space Station.

The ground and space based radiation studies of the Gumstix™ module will be the first published studies of its kind.  This will be an initial and an important first step to integrate this powerful system on a chip technology into future radiation tolerant computers.

A copy of the slides is provided below.

Gumstix in Space

Advanced Materials Applications, LLC  wins a grant from CASIS to evaluate the performance of Gumstix™ system on a chip technology in low earth orbit.

ref: www.astrium.eads.net

An excerpt from the abstract of the proposal is provided below.:

Radiation hardened and radiation tolerant computers do not offer an optimum processing solution for space applications that are computationally demanding such as signal processing and analysis, data capture, and sensing and detection.  Current space qualified computers use processors that are 2 or 3 generations behind the state-of-the-art terrestrial processing technologies.  Advanced Materials Applications, LLC (AMA) proposes ground based and space based radiation studies to investigate the feasibility of the Gumstix^™ Computer On Module (COM) technology for use in non-critical computationally intensive space applications.   Gumstix^™ modules are gum stick sized and use current generation OMAP processors with ARM Cortex-A8 architecture.  The proposed study is an important step towards their use in a fault tolerant computers that could meet the computational demands of current and next generation space missions.