The problem with solar system bodies is that their masses, and therefore gravities, differ from Earth’s. It’s not such a big deal for planets like Mars, which, with one third of Earth’s gravity, can still comfortably hold onto objects on its surface. But on smaller bodies such as moons and asteroids, mechanical systems don’t behave as they do on Earth, said Fabio Bühler, a robotics research assistant at the ETH Zürich university in Switzerland.

“Classical rover systems that use wheels, like the Mars rovers, really struggle in low gravity environments,” Bühler, who led a team designing an experimental robot that could help explore small solar system bodies, told Engineering.com. “There’s no traction [in low gravity], so you can’t really drive in these environments.”

SpaceHopper is an experimental robot designed to effectively explore in low gravity. (Image: ETH Zürich.)

Even Earth’s moon, with a gravity six times weaker than that of Earth, can pose a challenge for wheeled vehicles, especially on slopes or in rough terrain. Bühler and his team of students decided to build a hopping robot, called SpaceHopper, that would be stable, independent and lightweight enough to explore distant mini worlds on its own. Here’s how they designed this fascinating style of locomotion.

Jump like a cat

Instead of wheels, SpaceHopper’s body rests on three legs with bendable joints, and it uses motors located in its hips and knees to propel itself upward. The student designers settled on three legs to give the robot stability when it rests on the surface, but also to keep its mass within limits as would be required for a future space trip.

“We designed this robot as a technology demonstrator to show that it’s possible to do that with current state-of-the-art technology legged robots,” Bühler said. “We envision that this kind of robotic explorer could move around low gravity bodies, for example to search for rare minerals and look for suitable locations ahead of a bigger mission.”

The students used Siemens NX CAD and simulation tools to rapidly iterate the design of the robot’s mechanical components. The electronics were designed with the open source KiCAD EDA platform. The main challenge, Bühler said, was to make the parts as lightweight and as compact as possible. The ETH Zürich team then 3D-printed the most promising solutions and tested them in the real world.

Design iterations of SpaceHopper’s knee housing. (Image: ETH Zürich.)

Nvidia’s Isaac simulation software subsequently helped the team to optimize the design of the robot’s legs and their locomotion. Taking inspiration from the ability of cats to always land on their feet when dropped, the students wanted the robot to be able to twist itself mid-air using just the inertia of its limbs to assume a correct position for a safe impact ahead of the next jump.

“The robot needs to land in a predefined orientation, otherwise, it’s not going to be able to use its feet,” Bühler said. “Traditionally, space engineers would use flywheels to stabilize the orientation of a robot, but that’s going to be an additional subsystem that needs more engineering and adds additional weight. So, we decided to use the robot’s legs to do this, the way cats do.”

2,000 twins

In their simulation, the students created a digital asteroid surface with programmed microgravity conditions similar to those on the asteroid Ceres. Some 950 kilometers wide, Ceres is the largest rock in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter where the majority of solar system’s asteroids reside. Due to its size, Ceres was the first space rock to have been discovered by astronomers in the early 1800s. Nearly perfectly spherical, the asteroid was once considered a planet candidate and is still an object of intense scientific interest. Ceres was studied in great detail by NASA’s Dawn mission, which visited it in 2016 and found it was covered in ice and likely possessed a subsurface ocean. (The presence of water on the space rock led scientists to think it might harbor microscopic life forms.) But with a gravity of only 3% that of Earth, Ceres could pose a challenge for landers.

“The simulations are crucial because there’s no way for us to test it here on Earth and test it cheaply,” said Bühler. “So we use a physics simulator where we can simulate low gravity environments and try, for example, different leg lengths. We could vary the length of the shin and the thigh and look how these design choices perform in a simulation.”

SpaceHopper jumping and landing in low gravity. (Image: ETH Zürich.)

After optimizing the robot’s design and demonstrating it could walk and jump on its three legs and land reliably on its feet, the engineering students used the same simulator to train the neural network that would be responsible for controlling the robot’s motion in the real world. They used a method known as reinforcement learning, which allows a system to figure out the most optimal behavior through its own unsupervised interactions with the environment in a trial-and-error fashion.

To speed up the training process, the students created 2,000 digital twins of the robot in the simulation. They instructed the twins to move independently around the digital asteroid Ceres, trying out things and learning in parallel from their mistakes. It took 12 hours to complete the basic training using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU.

“We used the proximal policy optimization algorithm to train the neural network,” said Bühler. “It’s really beneficial for us because we just tell the algorithm, for example, to jump in the most energy efficient way and then let it optimize the locomotion for energy efficiency.”

During the training process, the researchers kept altering some parameters of the robot’s system and mechanical behavior to teach the neural network to be somewhat flexible. Otherwise, Bühler said, the robot could struggle in the real world as no simulation is perfectly accurate.

“During the simulation, we need to vary some parameters, such as friction in the joints or the masses of the different limbs,” Bühler said. “That means the neural network doesn’t get really comfortable with the simulation environment but can generalize to other environments.”

Next stop — the moon

The 6-kilogram SpaceHopper is made of space-grade aluminum but features polymer-based 3D-printed parts inside its triangular body. The robot’s limbs are powered by motors made by Swiss firm Maxon, the same firm that produced electrical motors for NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, which is currently exploring the red planet.

“The goal of the project was to make the robot as space-ready as possible,” said Bühler. “The mechanical parts are mostly space-ready. The electronics are not, but the motors that are inside the robot, for example, could be easily replaced one-to-one by space-ready models.”

The neural network trained in the simulator runs on an Nvidia Jetson Nano microcomputer that would have to be swapped for a space-hardened processor for a real space mission.

Testing SpaceHopper on a parabolic flight to simulate weightlessness. (Image: ETH Zürich.)

The team recently tested the robot in a parabolic flight simulating weightlessness to verify that the “cat” approach to reorienting its body mid-flight works as expected. For the flight, the engineers had to replace most of the robot’s polymer-based 3D-printed components with sturdier aluminum parts to make sure they survived the experiments.

“The 3D-printed parts are quite brittle and if it broke during the flight, there would be a lot of small plastics floating around the plane,” said Bühler.

The team that built the SpaceHopper has completed their degrees, Bühler said, but ETH Zürich will keep developing the three-legged robot concept hoping to adapt it for moon exploration. The next-generation hopping robot could make it to space for real.

The post Like a cat, the SpaceHopper asteroid robot always lands on its feet appeared first on Engineering.com.

Aerospace and defense companies know this problem all too well. Manufacturing lead times on custom, small-batch orders can measure many weeks, and come with expensive invoices.

Mass production and custom manufacturing may seem at odds, but Sydney, Canada-based Protocase is bringing them together. The company’s mass custom approach merges the quick speed and low cost of mass production with the bespoke and low volume needs of custom design. Protospace, a two-year-old spin-off, brings mass custom to the aerospace and defense industry.

“Even to our aerospace and defense customers, we turn low volume orders around fully custom in two to three days instead of weeks or months,” Steve Lilley, co-founder and president of Protocase and Protospace, told Engineering.com.

With its mass custom approach to manufacturing, Protospace considers itself “The World’s Fastest Aerospace & Defense Supplier.” (Image: Protospace.)

How? It’s not easy, but Lilley shared how mass custom techniques can succeed even in the highly regulated aerospace industry. Protospace is a case in point: its customers, Lilley says, include 19 out of the top 20 Tier 1 aerospace companies in the world.

The art of mass customization

Protocase’s journey started in the mid-1990s in the Canadian tradition: in a pub over a glass of beer after a hockey match. Lilley, a mechanical engineer by training, had at that time been working for a small-scale electronics manufacturer, where he had struggled to source small batches of electronics enclosures for the company’s products. His friend Doug Milburn, at that time a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Waterloo, was facing the same problem.

“We couldn’t get a shop to want to take on the work of building two or three enclosures for us,” Lilley said. “And those that would take on the work wanted to charge us an absolute fortune for it and take weeks if not months to do it.”

The two bemoaned their lot, but the conversation quickly moved from problems to the exploration of possible solutions. Was there a way to deliver fully custom parts without the heavy burdens of cost and lead time? They thought there was. The idea was to follow the tenets of mass production—break down products into standardized parts and processes that could be perfected, delivered and repeated quickly and cheaply—while allowing for the unique touches required of custom designs.

Lilley and Milburn were convinced they could pull it off. In 2001, the pair founded Protocase to make custom electronic enclosures and sheet metal or CNC machined parts used for prototyping—and, with its mass custom techniques, to do it in just a few days. The company has now had over 20 years to perfect mass custom, and the key, Lilley says, is automation.

Automating the heck out of everything

Automation in manufacturing is hardly a novel concept, but it’s absolutely essential to mass customization. “We look at every piece of the process, every different stage of production and we determine every repeatable piece that’s in there, and we automate the heck out of it,” said Lilley.

And he means everything. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big piece of metal that’s being bent this way or that way. There’s a whole pile of what we call work elements that are exactly the same each and every time. And then what we do is we add what we call the parameters or those custom elements.”

Lilley gives an example of powder coating—a finishing process that uses an electric charge to fuse a dry powder to a metallic surface. The process, Lilley explained, consists of a set of repeatable steps such as spraying the powder on top of a substrate and subsequent baking to fuse and harden it into a smooth and solid varnish.

“You just develop all your processes around that, and you train around that and all of a sudden it becomes extremely, extremely efficient,” said Lilley. “The only custom part to powder coating is the color you’re going to paint it and the texture you’re going to paint it.”

Screenshot of Protocase Designer. (Image: Protocase.)

Another example of automating everything is Protocase Designer, a custom CAD program available for free on the company’s website. Based on predefined templates, the software allows customers to quickly create 3D models of their designs that Protocase engineers can refine before the item moves into production.

“[Protocase Designer] allows the designer to very quickly move from a template base of a part and customize it to their specific needs,” said Lilley. “It depends on the complexity of the project, but we have customers that can, within 30 minutes, produce a full 3D model of their enclosure.”

Manufacturing constraints and Protocase’s mass customization principles are built right into the software, allowing the project to move from CAD straight into the workshop. But the helpful tool is merely for those who want to use it; Protocase also supports designs from more popular CAD tools such as AutoCAD and SolidWorks.

Bringing mass custom to aerospace and defense

In 2022, Protocase spun out Protospace to focus its mass custom approach on the particular requirements of the aerospace and defense sector. The industry had been “jumping out at us,” Lilley said, and was clearly in need of the deliverables that mass customization could provide.

“We are a game changer to the whole aerospace and defense sector because these are big, expensive projects,” said Lilley. “When deadlines aren’t met, that can be devastating in terms of cost, in terms of product failures.”

Protospace makes sheet metal and CNC machined enclosures, parts and panels for the aerospace and defense industry. (Image: Protospace.)

Protospace comes with an extra set of challenges beyond those of mass custom. Protospace must be AS9100 certified, ITAR compliant, and adhere to higher inspection and security standards than Protocase while promising the same speedy delivery for low volume, custom projects. “It’s all about checking the boxes for the aerospace world,” Lilley said.

Efficiency is always at the top of the checklist. The drive for maximum efficiency is ingrained into Protospace’s DNA, from the way staff is selected to its “everything under one roof” approach that prevents delays.

“If there’s a particular capability that we don’t have, and we feel it fits within the model to be able to provide that better solution, then we just go and build that capability in,” Lilley said.

The market needs mass custom

It’s been a long journey since that discussion over a glass of beer in the mid-1990s. Protocase’s steep growth confirmed to Lilley and Milburn their suspicion that thousands of engineering companies around the world were facing issues that other suppliers couldn’t or were unwilling to address. There was a huge gap in the market and Protocase and Protospace found the way to plug it.

“We cater to the small one and two person companies that might be operating from their backyard garage right up to the top aerospace companies in the world,” Lilley said. “Our typical client is an electrical engineer who is designing an electronic product and struggling to package that electronic product into an enclosure.”

It’s a market that bigger competitors had shunned before. But Protocase found a way to tap into its potential and make it work. The company has grown to 400 employees and serves some 18,000 clients across North America today. Even the recent economic downturn that hit the tech industry on a large scale leading to mass layoffs hasn’t stopped Protocase’s and Protospace’s growth. Quite the contrary, said Lilley; lean times are pushing companies to look for lean solutions, and the mass customization approach optimized by Lilley’s team is fitting the bill.

The post How to make custom, space-ready parts in just 3 days appeared first on Engineering.com.

Using car manufacturing robots and computer simulations, the lab enables engineers to recreate aspects of the space environment that are otherwise difficult to understand. Data generated in the experiments could help spacecraft designers revolutionize how satellites are put together and make it easier for future repair, removal or refueling robots to service them, an important requirement at a time when growing numbers of orbiting spacecraft and debris cause concerns about sustainability of humankind’s use of near-Earth space.

Run by the Satellite Applications Catapult, the In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing Facility (IOSM) at Westcott has a 27-meter-long hall at its heart. Inside, amid pitch black walls, a duo of Kuka robots is surrounded by 34 motion capture cameras. The cameras track the scene from various angles, some focusing in detail on the robots’ dexterous end-effectors and whatever these hands clutch in any given experiment. While one of the robots is fixed to the floor, the other is mounted onto a slider that moves up and down a 16-meter-long track in the middle of the room. This is space on Earth.

A look inside the In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing Facility (IOSM) in Westcott, England. (Image: IOSM.) 

The IOSM facility is one of only a few such labs globally, Jeremy Hadall, the robotics development lead at the U.K. Satellite Applications Catapult, who manages the experiments, told engineering.com. Unlike other similar labs worldwide, the one in Westcott is open to smaller commercial companies developing next-generation space technologies such as in-orbit servicing and active space debris removal.

“The other facilities that are in existence are either run by government agencies or commercial entities, which both limit their availability for wider use,” Hadall said. “We saw a need to offer this service as an open platform for the industry to come and use when they need.”

Space is hard

Space is hard, every operator of a failed space mission will say. Especially when you are developing something that has not been done before. Manufacturers of satellite technologies always subject their contraptions to rigorous testing before putting them on top of a rocket and shooting them into space. Shaker tables capable of creating vibrations as strong as an earthquake simulate the tremors of a rocket launch. Vacuum chambers and thermal cycling test chambers put the devices through their paces to ensure they can survive in the harsh environment of space, battered by cosmic radiation and exposed to temperatures that swing from frigid -85° F (-65° C) to boiling 257° F (125 ° C).

Westcott’s IOSM lab doesn’t aim to replace existing testing protocols. Instead, it adds a new layer that enables engineers to recreate how their satellites will move in the weightless environment in Earth’s orbit.

“We can’t really simulate microgravity, but we can do a lot with the robots to negate that constraint,” Hadall said. “We use those robots to manipulate spacecraft and instruments around the room and by doing that, we can replicate trajectories and the motion patterns that they might come across or they might experience.”

In-orbit servicing robots that will be able to refuel and repair satellites in space to extend their lives, or even build future space stations or space-based solar farms, are part of humankind’s current space expansion ambitions, the effort to make space around the planet a bigger part of humankind’s everyday reality. But while these interactive technologies seem to work effortlessly in visualizations, making them perform for real is a challenge that has not yet been completely solved.

“Although we’ve been docking with the space station for decades, it’s still quite a tricky operation, particularly tricky if you’re trying to do it with something that has no real docking interface or no real place to grab hold of it,” Hadall explained. “If you try to do that with a satellite, you have to realize that the last time that satellite was seen by anyone was before it was launched. Since then, its solar panels, its antennas were deployed. They all stick out around in random places. It’s really hard to get up close to it without damaging any of those features, and then be able to grab hold of it and dock with it.”

The simulations are conducted at snail-pace speeds rather than at orbital velocities of nearly 18,641 miles per hour (30,000 kilometers per hour). The autonomous robots, guided by manufacturing simulation software Visual Components, attempt to bring the two spacecraft—the piece of debris and the garbage collector, or the servicer and the serviced spacecraft—together completely autonomously.

“Our facility allows people to bring their technologies, bring their vision-based navigation systems or their laser-based guidance systems or whatever they might be using, and attach them to one of the robots,” said Hadall. “Then the other robot acts as a target that we’re trying to capture or get close to. We get that robot moving around it, it can follow a random path, it can be a prescribed, known trajectory. And then we use the second robot to carry the sensor equipment, which is trying to find and navigate the spacecraft towards the target.”

Avoiding the worst-case scenario

Even in the well-understood environment of the lab, the operations are so challenging that engineers don’t dare to perform the reenactment of this orbital dance without first simulating it on a computer.

“The worst-case scenario for me is that we have a trajectory given to us by a supplier, we put it straight on the robots, and the robots do not follow the intended route,” said Hadall. “If someone crashed into the walls, damaged the equipment. That’s the worst-case scenario. So, as the first step, we will run [the whole experiment] through our simulation software, and check that it’s all working and that we know what we can expect to see with the robots.”

The simulations run on the Unity game engine or Nvidia Omniverse’s IsaacSim robotics simulator, which allows the engineers to add extra parameters that would otherwise be impossible to simulate. For example, in the digital world, the researchers can analyze consequences of unintended physical interactions between the servicing spacecraft and its target in the microgravity of space.

“If I touch something in space, it’s going to go off in a different direction,” said Hadall. “If you don’t capture an object properly, you may just change its trajectory and potentially create more debris. This type of reaction is very difficult to simulate physically down here on Earth, but in the simulation model, I can do that.”

The simulation, Hadall added, generates a wealth of data that help finetune the experiments before the robots get engaged.

Hadall said that although both the robots and the digital environment are based on commercially available technologies, the Westcott engineers build bespoke plugins to create the most space-like experience possible.

Through virtual reality headsets, the makers of the tested satellite system can examine in detail how their spacecraft interact or perform the tasks assigned to them as if they were standing next to them for real.

“In industrial robotics, the best place to see how things are working is when you stand next to them,” said Hadall. “That’s quite difficult to do even in a terrestrial manufacturing environment. In the space environment, it’s impossible. But having virtual reality or augmented reality means I can be there without physically being there. I can see what the different things are doing as the robots are carrying out the tasks.”

Lessons in sustainable space design

Lessons learned in the experiments are helping to finetune not only the tested systems but also produce insights that will help satellite manufacturers in the future make their spacecraft more serviceable and reduce the risk of the operations failing.

“In-orbit servicing is still a very nascent area and servicing technologies are very much in development,” said Hadall. “We have to rethink how we design satellites and I think it’s going to be quite a big change in the market in the next 10 years.”

The Hubble Space Telescope. (Image: NASA.)

So far, the only spacecraft designed to be serviced in orbit was the Hubble Space Telescope, Hadall added. The Westcott team has studied available information about how the venerable telescope was put together back in the 1980s to make replacing parts in orbit easier. But there is only so much that engineers can learn from the five astronaut missions that flew to Hubble in the 1990s and 2000s. Simulations can fill some of the gaps in the engineering knowledge and spark new ideas around the challenges future space robots will face.

“It gives users a really interesting and unique perspective on how the system is working, and how the hardware is interacting with each other,” Hadall added. “At the moment, very little in space is designed to be disassembled and recycled, so we need to learn how we are going to do that if we want to have satellites more sustainable. It’s an interesting technology challenge, but we still have a few years to solve it.”

—

Update February 16, 2024: An earlier version of this story misquoted Jeremy Hadall and misspelled his name as Hadal.

The post Space on Earth is here, and it’s helping aerospace engineers design next gen satellites appeared first on Engineering.com.

“There is frequently a 20-year technology gap when it comes to the computers you can send to space,” Ken O’Neill, space systems architect at AMD, told engineering.com. “In space, you have a lot of particle radiation, electrons, protons, heavy ions, as well as gamma rays and X-rays, and all of these things have a particularly harsh effect on microelectronics.”

A handful of companies, however, are working to send AI ad astra—and their work will open up new frontiers for the digitally transforming aerospace industry.

Making AI chips fit for space

Computers in space die faster and don’t work as reliably as those on Earth, unless they are designed to survive in the unforgiving environment. So-called single event effects triggered by strikes from energetic particles or cosmic rays can cause software errors and, in some cases, even destroy circuitry. Add to that the sweeping temperature differences that satellites are exposed to as they zoom in and out of sunshine multiple times a day. When not illuminated, spacecraft orbiting Earth face a cold of minus tens of degrees Celsius. When they cross into the sunshine, the temperature soars to over a hundred degrees Celsius. The rattle of the rocket launch adds an extra challenge for the electronics.

To be able to sell their chips as “fit for space,” manufacturers have to prove the devices are compliant with specifications outlined in a document called MIL-PRF-38535, issued by the U.S. military. The qualification process, O’Neill said, takes up to three years and involves rounds of testing including temperature cycling that simulates the frequent temperature changes in orbit, shaker tables that recreate the uproar of the launch and irradiation chambers that allow the engineers to verify the devices’ ability to withstand radiation. The testing itself is preceded by years of development and engineering that ensures the chip is fit for the ride.

In November 2022, AMD released what they describe as the first commercially available space-qualified chip capable of running complex AI and machine learning algorithms in real time.

The journey to the final product, the radiation-tolerant XQR Versal AI Core XQRVC1902, produced 50 patents, O’Neill said, focusing mostly on improving the chip’s ability to survive the high levels of radiation present in space around Earth. The company followed up on their first space-grade product in September 2023 with the Versal AI Core XQRVE2302, which is significantly smaller and about 75% less power hungry.

AMD’s Versal chip is designed to withstand the high levels of radiation in space. (Image: AMD.)

“We choose our materials and construction techniques based on our previous experience, knowing what would work and what wouldn’t,” O’Neill says. “The choice of materials has to be such that [the chip] will survive the temperature cycling and the high temperature during the operating life test. We have to be careful about the choice of materials for the integrated circuit and for the packaging of the integrated circuit.”

O’Neill added that the space-qualified chips are “substantially” more expensive than their equivalent non-space qualified counterparts, but still considerably cheaper than alternative bespoke solutions that had been available before.

“It’s a leading edge technology,” O’Neill said. “It’s on a 7-nanometer manufacturing technology and it has the same performance specs as the commercial Versal parts.”

The importance of the edge in space

Edge computing can be a huge boon for space technology, explains Henry Zhong, co-founder and head of AI at Spiral Blue, a Sydney-based start-up developing edge-computing platforms and applications that can be used in orbit.

“Edge computing is very useful in space because it’s very difficult to send the data that is collected in space to Earth,” Zhong told engineering.com. “It’s a lot of data. The data is recorded on the satellite, but we don’t have enough bandwidth to send all of it back to Earth.”

Earth-based computers, for example, are used to run AI algorithms that scour images of our planet captured by remote-sensing satellites and look for patterns based on the training they received. But because of the limited downlink availability, satellites only take images when tasked. In many instances, important information doesn’t reach Earth at all or only with a significant delay.

O’Neill cites wildfire detection as an example of an application where AI in space could make a huge difference—limit damage to the environment, save cost and possibly human lives.

“Currently, you may not know about a wildfire in a remote area until it spreads into a large size,” O’Neill says. “With Earth-observation satellites, if you have the AI on board, you can detect the presence of the wildfire earlier. Maybe a few hours earlier, maybe a few days. That not only gives you more time to evacuate people, but it would also help contain the wildfire before it spreads too much.”

Similarly, intelligent algorithms could sift through images and delete those covered in clouds or alert operators to any unusual and unexpected events that might be taking place too far from humans’ immediate reach.

“Only about 10% of the raw data currently gets sent down compared to what the satellite is actually capable of capturing,” says Zhong. “But when it comes to disaster monitoring, you want to be able to assess the situation in a timely manner and make decisions that are frequent and up to date.”

Taking a risk on AI hardware

Spiral Blue has a less perfectionist approach to AI in space than AMD. Embodying the new space ethos of flying cheap things fast and fixing them later, the company has launched four of its custom-designed Space Edge One computers fitted with AI capable chips since January 2023. Only one of these computers is still operational, Zhong said.

“Our goal is to get cheap commodity off the shelf hardware, integrate it into a satellite and then launch as many of them as possible because some are bound to fail,” Zhong says. “They are not designed specifically to be operated in extremely harsh environments, but so far most of them seem quite robust.”

One of Spiral Blue’s computers is circling Earth aboard a satellite of the U.S.-based Earth observation company Satellogic. The AI chip at the computer’s heart is the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX, a mass-produced, widely available system-on-module (SoM) released in 2019. The chip sits on a custom-designed carrier board, which is then integrated into the customer satellite.

Spatial Blue uses the commercially available Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX SoM in its satellite hardware. (Image: Spatial Blue.)

Zhong said the company took their chances with the kind of radiation hazards that AMD so meticulously works to mitigate. Spiral Blue’s engineers designed a copper plate that covers the hardware to dissipate heat and reduce the influx of charged particles. The resulting computer was put through radiation testing, the company said, and did well, giving Spiral Blue sufficient confidence that their Space Edge Computers could survive in space for up to five years. And that might be enough for makers of small satellites and cubesats that are designed and launched with much shorter intended mission times than old-school agency-built satellites.

AMD, on the other hand, guarantees the users of their radiation tolerant XQR Versal AI Core chips up to seven years of flawless operations.

Early days for space-based AI

According to O’Neill, it will take some time for AI to make a major mark on how things are done in space. Right now, he says, academics on all fronts research and speculate about the possible uses of AI in space, but not many practical applications have been developed.

“We’re kind of right at the beginning of the use of AI in space,” O’Neill says. “The demand at the moment is quite low but growing very strongly. Most of the interest comes from research institutions and not much of it has translated into operational systems yet, but it’s certainly happening.”

The possible applications go beyond analyzing images of Earth in space. Maintenance software could monitor and evaluate satellites’ health in real time based on measurements of on-board sensors. Fully autonomous algorithms could help probes visiting distant planets to select the most suitable landing sites and bring the spacecraft to a safe touch down. Clever programs could help satellites dodge space debris.

O’Neill says scientists are intrigued by the possibility of reprogramming chips and adjusting their functionality remotely from Earth, allowing them to finetune algorithms as new discoveries are made and new questions arise.

“There’s so much flexibility to modify and evolve the application even after it’s already been deployed in space,” O’Neill says. “That tends to be very beneficial to our space customers.”

The post Space-Safe AI Chips Will Open New Frontiers for Aerospace Engineers appeared first on Engineering.com.

Space Perspective’s Neptune spaceship is made up of the large hydrogen-filled SpaceBalloon and the passenger capsule below. (Image: Space Perspective.)

In this exciting era for space travel, a balloon trip above the Earth is one of the more interesting innovations. It wouldn’t be possible without clever engineering, a lot of simulation, cutting-edge digital twins and a desire to democratize the view of a lifetime.

Floating into the stratosphere

Imagine what it would be like to be a Space Perspective passenger. At a leisurely speed of 12 miles per hour (19 km/h), you and seven fellow travelers (plus one pilot) ascend into the stratosphere, the second lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. There, at an altitude of 100,000 feet (30 kilometers), you enjoy the breathtaking views of Earth, its curvature beneath your feet shrouded in the thin bluish veil of the planet’s gaseous coat. Above your head, the star-studded blackness of the cosmos extend into infinity.

Instead of being strapped into your reclining seat for the majority of the experience, you can roam freely around the Neptune space capsule, a luxurious lounge replete with decorative plants, interactive lighting and sound systems, and even a bar. Of course, your attention will most likely be fixed on the tall windows that ring the spherical capsule, which Space Perspective says will be the largest windows ever flown to space.

Inside the Neptune space capsule, passengers will be free to walk around, grab a drink and enjoy the view. (Image: Space Perspective.)

You won’t experience the sensation of microgravity floating, which is the main draw of rocket-powered sub-orbital flights. But then again, since you’re not in it for the adrenaline, you might happily settle for a glass of champagne instead, or just meditate while taking in the fragile beauty of our home planet.

“We are completely reimagining space travel,” Jane Poynter, Space Perspective co-founder and co-CEO said during a presentation at the Siemens Realize LIVE Americas 2023 user conference in June. “When most people think about space travel, they think about space suits and having the ‘right stuff.’ It’s for somebody else to do. We’ve totally rethought what it is for all of us to go to space.”

Engineering a new kind of space travel

Space Perspective isn’t the only company taking tourists into space, but for the average Joe, it may be the most appealing. While rocket-powered sub-orbital vehicles such as those operated by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin may be vulnerable to teething problems, the balloon technology employed by Space Perspective is well-tested.

Since the 1950s, NASA and other research institutions around the world have been using similar balloons to lift research telescopes and other experiments up into the stratosphere. The core technology has been “safely flown to over 100,000 feet more than a thousand times,” Space Perspective co-founder and co-CEO Taber MacCallum told engineering.com.

Still, making the experience the smoothest it can be took some complex engineering. The capsule and the balloon have to withstand extreme temperature differences as they pass through the atmosphere. In the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere at an altitude of about 10 miles (16 kilometers), the craft will be subject to freezing temperatures as low as -120 F (-80 C). Once the spaceship rises above the tropopause, it encounters the near vacuum of the stratosphere.

At that point, 99% of the atmosphere’s mass would be below the spacecraft. In the thin residual gas of the stratosphere, the balloon, under which the capsule is suspended, expands so much that it would swallow the entire Statue of Liberty. But the polyethylene-based material that the balloon is made of must withstand such an expansion as it is required to take the capsule back to Earth.

“The SpaceBalloon is what is technically called a ‘zero-pressure balloon,’ meaning there is little to no pressure difference between the interior and the surrounding environment,” says MacCallum. “It cannot ‘pop.’ In the unlikely event there is a hole in the balloon envelope, it simply descends very slowly and floats down to a safe landing.”

In case anything goes wrong with the balloon, it will be backed up by a parachute system based on technology used by NASA to land rovers on Mars.

The Neptune capsule is made of a carbon composite material and features those large, panoramic windows, which added to the technical challenges of making the capsule. Engineers had to develop a special film that prevents heat-carrying infrared radiation from entering the capsule. At the same time, however, the windows have to be perfectly transparent to provide unspoiled views.

The Neptune capsule features what Space Perspective says are the largest windows ever flown to space. (Image: Space Perspective.)

To tackle the challenges, Space Perspective used engineering software from Siemens, including STAR-CCM+ for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and cloud computing resources from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which allowed engineers to run multiple simulations in parallel.

“There has been a huge amount of work done on how we control the temperature inside [the capsule],” said Poynter. “The Siemens software has been incredibly helpful to the team in really figuring out the air flows and energy flows in and around the capsule.”

Simulating the impact of solar energy on the Neptune space capsule. (Image: Space Perspective.)

 Space Perspective relied on these tools not only to understand the thermal environment and their spaceship’s response to it, but also to perfect the shape and structure of the capsule—a deceptively tricky task.

Reinventing the sphere

The Space Perspective design team experimented with various shapes for the Neptune capsule. Ultimately, they determined that a conventional sphere would be the best and safest option.

“Some of our early designs were more squat and squashed,” said Poynter. “They were really fun to look at, but for physics reasons we ended up going with the circular globe. It makes the most sense in terms of mass efficiency, but it also provides a lot of head space.”

Some of the initial design options for the Neptune capsule. (Image: Space Perspective.)

But there was one big problem with the sphere, and it only became apparent when simulating the end of the spaceship’s six-hour voyage. Spaceship Neptune will launch from the sea, from a vessel dubbed Marine Spaceport (MS) Voyager. The capsule will take two hours to rise to its peak altitude, where it will spend two hours lingering in the stratosphere, allowing its eight passengers ample time to enjoy the views. Finally, still attached to its balloon, the capsule will take another two hours to slowly descend and splashdown in the sea.

The six-hour journey of the Neptune spaceship. (Image: Space Perspective.)

The simulations showed the splashdown to be the trickiest part of the journey. In early simulations, the spherical capsule bounced on the water surface “like a beachball,” according to Poynter.

The engineers came up with a solution: a cone-shaped extension attached to the bottom of the capsule, which slices up the water and prevents the bouncing. It took thousands of simulation rounds to perfect the shape of the patented “Splashcone,” Poynter said.

Simulation of the Neptune capsule’s Splashcone, used to improve its splashdown performance. (Image: Space Perspective.)

“Working with Siemens and Amazon Web Services has allowed us to quickly do thousands of design iterations on highly nuanced components such as the Splashcone that attenuates the splashdown,” added MacCallum. “These iterations would have historically taken weeks or even months—instead, they ran in a matter of hours.”

Neptune’s digital twin

To perfect every aspect of the flight experience, Space Perspective’s engineers built a digital twin of the entire system. The model takes into account detailed weather forecast data to accurately pinpoint where the capsule will land. During uncrewed flight tests conducted in 2021, the balloon landed within 2,600 feet (800 meters) of the predicted splashdown location. Data gathered during the tests were further fed into the models to prepare for crewed tests, which Space Perspective hopes to commence by early 2024.

“Before we produced a single piece of carbon, we ran many simulations of how the spacecraft would perform in flight,” said MacCallum. “That includes the structure in every pressure and thermal environment and at splashdown, the thermal environment and the interactions with the windows and external atmospheric pressures, and the Splashcone’s interactions with the water at splashdown and the rest of the capsule structure.”

Inside the capsule, conditions are similar to those in a commercial aircraft, said MacCallum. However, the capsule is fitted with a sophisticated life-support system inspired by technologies used at the International Space Station that scrub CO2 from the interior atmosphere, produce oxygen and control humidity.

“Each system is fully redundant,” said MacCallum. “There are two independent and fully redundant thermal control systems, for example.”

Although there will be a pilot aboard, the spaceship can fly fully autonomously or be controlled from Space Perspective’s mission control center in Florida.

If you’re tempted, tickets for Space Perspective’s balloon rides are already on sale for $125,000 apiece, a little over one fourth of the price of Virgin Galactic’s sub-orbital flights. The company is accepting deposits of $1,000 to $60,000. The bigger the deposit you pay, the sooner you’ll fly, said Poynter.

Space Perspective hopes to begin commercial operations in late 2024 and gradually build up a launch cadence of over 100 flights per year. The first flights will be taking off from Florida’s space coast, but Space Perspective plans to offer flights from its marine spaceport vessels from other locations around the U.S. and internationally.

The post This is How Engineers Designed the Luxury Balloon That You (Yes, You!) Can Ride to Space appeared first on Engineering.com.