Two Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers sent to the International Space Station in August 2017 as an experiment have not returned to Earth, three months after their scheduled return. Together they make up the Spaceborne Computer, a Linux system with supercomputer-like processing power. They were sent to see how resilient they would be in space with minimal specialized treatment. After 530 days, they are still working.
Their return flight was postponed after the Russian rocket failed in October 2018. HPE senior architect Adrian Kasbergen said they could return in June 2019 if all goes well.
The company is working with NASA to be “computer-ready” for the first manned Mars flight, which is estimated to take place around 2030. The company is also working with Elon Musk’s Space X.
Currently, 20-year-old machines are checking the ISS data returning to Earth for processing. This is possible because it takes less than a second for the data to return.
But on a Mars mission, the time required for a data journey would increase to more than 40 minutes, as the planet is millions of miles away. This means that data processing would have to be done on the spacecraft.
The three original computers on the ISS cost $8 million each and took 10 years to build, Mr Kasbergen told BBC News.
“Our servers cost thousands instead of millions of dollars,” he added, speaking at the 2019 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, where HPE is showing off a replica of the ISS’s Destiny Module. The space computer is built into the ceiling of the real thing, Kasbergen said.
The servers were placed in an airtight box with a cooler connected to the ISS water cooling system. The hot air from the computers is routed through the cooler to be cooled and circulated back.
Mr Kasbergen said there were unforeseen problems with the power supply, as well as with some of the redundant solid-state drives. But he said the failures were handled by the autonomous management software that was part of the experiment. The devices will need to be inspected on Earth to learn exactly what is going on.
