∞Infinity And Beyond: An Introduction to Calculating Our Journey to The Far Reaches of Space
Figure 1: ∞ And Beyond: An Introduction to Calculating Our Journey to The Far Reaches of Space (Source: Wikipedia)
Since the beginning of time, man has looked up to the stars and wondered, “How can I get there?” Many centuries later, Apollo 11 astronaut, Neil Armstrong, ventured outside the capsule onto the stark surface of the Moon and stated, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” This major achievement culminated President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to send a man to the Moon. The dream of traveling midst the stars and exploring new worlds still drives us to aspire to new heights.
Technology Makes it Possible
None of this would have been possible without the development of both fast and small electronic components that now form the backbone of modern information and processing space technology. This article will take a short look at the historical advancements made in space computing since the dawn of the space age.
The human brain is a complex and amazing instrument. It is able to do many things computationally that nothing else in the known universe can do. However, the human brain is not capable of processing ongoing and continual high speed information (MHz) that requires precision beyond several decimal places. Just prior to Kennedy’s presidency, Jack Kilby invented and developed the integrated circuit (IC), or “the chip.” Due to the creation of ICs, mankind now has the ability to process and calculate ongoing and continual high-speed information quickly, efficiently, and with great precision. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who would go on to be one of the original founders of Intel (1968), stated that electronics would continue to shrink in size such that approximately every eighteen months the density of the circuits would be twice as much. Over the past fifty years the processing speed and available memory of ICs has grown exponentially, enabling engineers to journey into the far reaches of space.
Journey to the Moon
The guidance system used during the Apollo 11 mission was the world’s first computer that provided real-time flight information from which the spacecraft was automatically navigated towards its target, the moon, located approximately 350,000km away. The guidance system was designed by personnel at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The backup to the flight computer was simple pocket calculators and slide rules.
Now hold your breath: It had a whopping 64KB of memory and operated at a frequency of 2MHz. By way of comparison, a device that is common to many people around the world, Apple’s ubiquitous iPhone 6 has a 1GB memory and a CPU clocking in at 1.4 GHz. So your personal cell phone computes at several orders of magnitude above what was “state of the art” to land a man on the moon.
Figure 3: Voyager 1 (Source: Wikipedia)
Voyager
Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched from earth in 1977. Part of their primary mission was to explore the two largest planets: Jupiter and Saturn. They continue on in their travels and are presently further away from the sun than Pluto. Voyager 1 and 2 have 69.63KB of memory each. By comparison, if you use a portable media player like the Apple iPod Nano 16GB MP3 player, you will have about 240,000 times the memory a Voyager spacecraft. Even now, while in interstellar space, the spacecraft communicate back to earth in real time. They do so at a rate of about 160 bits/s. Transmissions are captured by 34- and 70-meter Deep Space Network (DSN) stations. “The Voyager transmits signals at about 20 watts — the power of a refrigerator light bulb. By the time the signals get to Earth, their power has diminished to a fraction of a billion-billionth of a watt.”
Orbiter Vehicles: Space Shuttle Program
With the landing on the moon a large effort was made to develop and implement an orbiter fleet that would establish an easier pathway to entering and exiting outer space. These efforts ultimately lead to the Space Shuttle program, which had its first mission in 1981. The computers used in these crafts were built by IBM. The computer grew out of development that the U.S. military had done for fighters and bombers. It could process around 480,000 instructions per second with 16 bits available to address memory. The primary flight computer used in the space shuttle Atlantis has only approximately one percent of the processing power of a Microsoft Xbox 360 game console. The reason NASA says it had not upgraded the computers to something more powerful and in accord with the latest technology of the times, is that it did not want to introduce anything that might impact reliability. It has been said that the Sony PlayStation 4 of today has the power of a military supercomputer of twenty years ago.
Keeping Track of Our Journeys Here on Earth: Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
Some things that we have placed out into space also have direct benefits for us today in applications that we largely take for granted. In the mid-1980s I had the opportunity to crew on a Santa Cruz 50 Yacht out of Long Beach, CA. A key factor in yacht racing besides a fast boat and good crew was excellent navigation. I recall one day when I arrived on the yacht, there was a large computer display mounted on our mast. The owner of the yacht had bought a GPS system. No one else on board the yacht was familiar with what this equipment did. We soon saw when we got out to sea that this system was able to accurately tell us where we were at, how fast we were traveling, what direction we were heading, map where we had been, and plot where we should head to next. We began beating everyone in the fleet because we had such an advantage.
This space-based satellite navigation system now provides location and time information in all weather conditions, and anywhere on or near the earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. These satellites are in orbit at a height of approximately 20,000km. GPS satellites contain atomic clocks that are synchronized both to ground stations and to each other. The satellites broadcast frequencies greater than 1GHz. The satellites continually transmit both their time and position. A receiver collects transmissions from multiple satellites simultaneously and then performs extensive mathematical calculations to determine the position and possible deviation from the ‘standard’ time. “GPS receivers have been achieving horizontal accuracy of 3 meters or better and vertical accuracy of 5 meters or better 95% of the time.”
Figure 5: How GPS Works, Download at http://www.gps.gov/multimedia/poster/poster-web.pdf
GPS has found its way into everyday applications. Many vehicles today come equipped with it so that one always knows where their vehicle is, where it is heading, and can map the best way to get there. Similarly mobile phones and devices may include these capabilities so that an individual user can do the same. The amount of processing power that is available to the individual today would make the astronauts of 1969 quite envious.
Asteroids and Mars
Announced in 2011, the next phase of space travel will be aboard the Orion platform which is a Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). It will be carried into space by way of the Space Launch System (SLS), and is the successor to the space shuttle program. It is scheduled to be able to go to the International Space Station (ISS) but is targeted for taking several astronauts to places well beyond the earth’s orbit, possibly including asteroids and Mars. At present it is in development and testing, and won’t carry astronauts until sometime after 2021. The computers employed will be much more advanced than previously, but these details are not yet publically disclosed.
What are the technical challenges involved in landing on an asteroid and taking a sample boulder back home? Well, consider the following: On March 25, 2015, NASA unveiled a $1.25B plan to land on an asteroid. “The ship would spend about a year circling the large space rock and pluck a 4 meter boulder off its surface using robotic arms. It would have three to five opportunities to grab the rock,” said Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s associate administrator. Lightfoot also identified the leading target. “It’s a 400-meter wide space rock called 2008 EV5, making it somewhat larger than most of the asteroids that circle the sun near Earth.” Imagine all the necessary and ongoing calculations to acquire, track, travel to, settle upon, and retrieve a sample from such an operation. The project length of one year just to circle the asteroid itself demonstrates the ongoing complexity and vastness of such an operation.
Over the past fifty years we have progressed from being able to move from broaching outer space to traveling across the solar system. This has been made possible by small and fast ICs that mankind has developed. As electronic component technologies continue to develop, mankind will be able to explore even farther into space. The progress we have made to date indicates that our progress tomorrow will help propel us forward into an exploration of outer space exploration as we continue to explore to the furthest limits that we can reach.
1Kennedy (1917–1963) proclaimed this in his May 25, 1961, speech before a joint session of Congress.
2Kilby (1923–2005) did this in 1958, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.
3 The moon landing was July 20, 1969.
4
5Cliff Saran, "Apollo 11: The Computers That Put Man on the Moon", TechTarget http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Apollo-11-The-computers-that-put-man-on-the-moon#.VRWugsGrcDc.email (accessed March 27, 2015 2015).
6The Apple’s iPhone 6 was introduced in 2014.
7http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/slideshows/index.cfm?id=25&page=2, Slide 2.
8http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/ 9"Voyager to the Outer Planets and into Interstellar Space", National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/voyager-fact-sheet-091213.pdf (accessed March 27, 2105).
10NASA, "Chapter 4: Computers in the Space Shuttle Avionics System", NASA http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/computers/Ch4-1.html (accessed March 27, 2015). For instance: F-15, B-1B, B-52.
11This was later increased to 20 bits.
12Atlantis was in operation from 1985–2011. The Microsoft Xbox 360 was released in 2005. It has a 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon for a CPU. “Space Shuttle: Fast Facts: Xbox 360 Has More
13 Power than Flight Computer,” The Huntsville Times, July 08, 2011. Ibid.
14Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2011). BY way of example the PlayStation 4 has an 8-Core AMD “Jaguar” CPU.
15http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Yachts
16"Gps.Gov", U.S. Air Force http://www.gps.gov/ (accessed March 27, 2015).
17GPS Standard Positioning Service (SPS) Performance Standard, Fourth Edition. Ibid.
18 The International Space Station (ISS) was originally launched in 1998.
19 Henry Fountain, "First Flight Test Is Successful for Nasa’s Orion Spacecraft", New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/science/nasa-orion-spacecraft-lifts-off-into-orbit.html?_r=0 (accessed March 27, 2015).
20"NASA Plans Mission to Land on Asteroid and Explore Deep Space." The Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/26/nasa-plans-mission-to-land-on-asteroid-and-explore-deep-space (accessed March 27, 2015).