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.