Linux Rocket Blasts Off This Fall

HardcoreGamer writes "An Oregon amateur rocket group, the Portland State Aerospace Society, plans to launch a Linux-powered rocket weighing 12 pounds to 55,000 feet at a speed of Mach 3 in September, Wired News reports. The rocket's onboard computer is an AMD 586 processor and a Jumptec MOPS/520 PC/104+ board along with a power supply, a PCMCIA card carrier for an 802.11b card to transmit data to the ground, and a carrier board for a 128-MB CompactFlash card for long-term storage. The flight computer runs a stripped-down version of Debian Linux, with the 2.4.20 Linux kernel. The group will present a paper (HTML | PDF ) on the use of free software in rocketry at Usenix 2003. The real question is whether their network card will survive 10 seconds at 15 Gs!"

Re:802.11b?

[barawn]

2 things - first, they're not operating in the unlicensed mode - they're using a licensed Ham operator, so they can boost the power.

Second, they've got clear line of sight (um, unless they plan on launching the thing in the middle of the woods) so you don't lose any signal strength going through things, so you've only got 1/r^2 to deal with. It's a distance, hell yes, but a good enough antenna on both ends will do fine. The only problem with that is that only the ground has a pointable antenna, so here's hoping they've got plenty of link margin.

Will never fly...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

As others have pointed out, it is not *linux* powered. But now thanks to Ashcroft and his straight man, bin Laden - anyone using model rocket fuel is considered a terrorist threat [scifitoday.com]. So, not only is not linux powered, it probably won't be powered at all.

Re:Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, despite all the hype, rocket science isn't really all that tough.

Re:IANARS but...

[temojen]

Not only did Linux "Suck Ass" for doing hard realtime, most of the architectures that it runs on do as well. For tasks of this nature, unpredictabilities like cache misses can be deadly, so you want much of the critical control features to run on as simple an architecture as possible.

PIC or MC68hc11 are good candidates, anything more complex than an 8080 probably isn't.

If it's controlling thrust vectoring, control surfaces, or fuel valves, I sure wouldn't want an OS like Linux, Windows, HPUX, Solaris, etc with multitasking and/or VM.

security?

[Muhammed Absol]

I have to wonder if 802.11b is really all that great of an idea for this. A person could build a jammer for $5 in radio shack parts that would crash this thing.

15G is nothing

[nmg196]

15G is nothing - that's like dropping the card onto carpet from about 2ft. Not exactly stressful for some solid state hardware - even a hard drive could probably cope with that while running. The duration doesn't make much difference - providing they don't exceed the amount of G required to break something (probably more like 80+G). The vibrations might cause the G level to peak much higher than the overall accelleration of the rocket however.

I would have thought that vibrations are much worse than the overall acceleration of the rocket; Anyone ever taken a computer out of the back of a car (which probably never exceeds 1.5G) only to find that some screws have come loose or a PCI card has fallen out? (cos I have!).

What is it with these amateur rocketeers & PC1

[marlowe]

PC104 is NOT a good bus for hard real time applications. It hasn't got enough bandwidth or interrupt support. Couldn't they at least go PCI or CPCI?

Maybe it's not so bad. It sounds like all the mission critical I/O is on the CPU board, so it doesn't go through that damn bus. But even so, it makes me wonder about their thought processes. Maybe it'll work. But if it does, it won't be because of PC104. It'll be despite it.

PC104+ is a stupid kluge. Adapting an architecture from the IBM PC-AT to a class of applications it was never intended for. PC104+ is to hardware what Windows CE is to operating systems.

Oh well. At least they're not using Windows CE.

Re:I realize you are joking...

[bear_phillips]

How about telling us how we can help?