*If they ever manage to build and launch a "flying laptop," it'll be promptly pwned and put in a "flying botnet."
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/deltav/23889/?nlid=2210
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Reprogramming Satellites during Flight
New research shows that a space probe's hardware could be reconfigured on the fly.
By Brittany Sauser
Researchers in Germany have developed satellites that can be radically reconfigured in orbit. The approach could ultimately lead to multitasking satellites capable of switching, for example, from detecting pollution to searching for earthlike planets.
The researchers, led by Toshinori Kuwahara of the Institute of Space Systems at the University of Stuttgart, plan to launch a test satellite called Flying Laptop in 2012. The spacecraft's onboard computer will be able to reconfigure its own electronic hardware. The satellite will also carry a suite of instruments and sensors including cameras, multispectral imagers, thermal infrared imagers, and GPS receivers. The research appears in the spaceflight journal Acta Astronautica.
Making satellites that can rewire themselves could save millions of dollars and reduce the amount of space junk in orbit. In addition, there could be more scientific collaboration and data gathering. Kuwahara told New Scientist that the spacecraft could even be rented out to different groups of researchers during the same mission, spreading out the cost.
Kuwahara built the satellite using microchips called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These allow the spacecraft's electronics to be reconfigured for a particular task, instead of having a predetermined configuration that can operate only in a set way...
(((More and somewhat different: "Arduino in space.")))
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/07/arduino_in_space.html
