Maxwell Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: MXWL) has won a contract valued at approximately $3 million from Astrium’s United Kingdom-based satellite unit to supply single board computers (SBC) for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) “Gaia” astronomy mission to survey more than a billion stars and other celestial bodies to trace the origin and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Seven Maxwell SCS750 SBCs will process images and data gathered by the two-ton satellite’s camera, which will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the duration of the five-year mission named for the Greek goddess Gaia, who was worshipped as the mythological creator of the universe. The massive volume of data to be collected and the precision of the imaging instrumentation will enable scientists to create a three-dimensional map of the galaxy and study its formation with unprecedented detail and accuracy.
The satellite will be launched into an orbit at Lagrange point 2, which is 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) into space on the “night side” of Earth so that it will be shielded from glare from the Earth, Sun and Moon that otherwise would interfere with image and data collection. Its payload will include two telescopes and a camera capable of processing digital images from more than one hundred charge-coupled devices (CCDs) of 10 million pixels each.
It is the belief of the European Space Agency that the Gaia mission’s impact on astronomy will be comparable to that of weather satellites to meteorology or genome mapping projects to genetics. Maxwell’s space computer provides the high performance and flexibility the scientific and engineering team will need to achieve the mission’s ambitious goals.
Peter Bennie, Project Team Leader of Astrium UK, which is responsible for development and installation of the satellite’s video processing units, said, “we selected Maxwell’s SCS750 after our exhaustive evaluation of available space-qualified computers determined that it was the only SBC that could meet both our video processing requirements and Gaia’s power and mass constraints.”
Proprietary component shielding technology and system-level architecture enable Maxwell’s SBC to withstand the effects of environmental radiation to provide the most reliable space computer currently available. The SCS750 is based on a “triple modular redundancy” architecture in which three commercial IBM PowerPC 750(TM) processors run the same program at all times and “vote” on each operation. If one of the processors suffers a radiation-induced upset and disagrees with the other two, the system is automatically resynchronised and resumes error-free operation.
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