Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced that hundreds of its radiation-hardened (rad-hard) integrated circuits (ICs), including over 50 different part numbers, are onboard the Artemis 1 launch that blasted off on November 16. Intersil-brand rad-hard ICs are part of the battery management systems, RS-25 engine control electronics and the launch abort system on the Space Launch System that propelled the mission into space, the most powerful rocket ever built. On the Orion Capsule that will circle the moon, Renesas provided critical components for controller boards, the main flight computer, the docking camera system, the power distribution system and display and panel electronics. The Intersil-brand ICs perform multiple functions, including power management and precision signal processing.

Artemis is the ambitious NASA program that will take humankind back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Artemis 1 is sending the test-mannequin populated Orion capsule to orbit the moon and deploy cubesats and other space experiments on a 42-day mission to test all the critical systems. Artemis 2 (2024) will have a crew that will orbit the moon paving the way for Artemis 3 (2025), which will land the first woman and the first person of color on the moon. The plan is for Artemis to continue to build a space station in lunar orbit and a base on the lunar South Pole. This infrastructure will allow for the awe-inspiring goal of a crewed mission to Mars in the 2040s.

SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced it has been selected by NASA to provide the core CPU for NASA's next generation High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor. HPSC is expected to be used in virtually every future space mission, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions. HPSC will utilize an 8-core, SiFive Intelligence X280 RISC-V vector core, as well as four additional SiFive RISC-V cores, to deliver 100x the computational capability of today's space computers. This massive increase in computing performance will help usher in new possibilities for a variety of mission elements such as autonomous rovers, vision processing, space flight, guidance systems, communications, and other applications.

"As the leading RISC-V, U.S. based, semiconductor company we are very proud to be selected by the premier world space agency to power their most mission critical applications," said Jack Kang, SVP Business Development, SiFive. "The X280 demonstrates orders of magnitude performance gains over competing processor technology and our SiFive RISC-V IP allows NASA to take advantage of the support, flexibility, and long-term viability of the fast-growing global RISC-V ecosystem. We've always said that with SiFive the future has no limits, and we're excited to see the impact of our innovations extend well beyond our planet."

US President Joe Biden on Monday released the first public image from the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. The infrared image was captured by the telescope's NIRCAM (near-infrared camera); and shows in detail the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster as it appeared 4.6 billion years in the past. In other words, the light received by the telescope started its journey from some 4.6 billion light years away. The image shows thousands of galaxies of various types, including galactic collisions. There is some amount of refraction in the image, probably from from gravitational lensing. The bright objects in the image are local stars. The JWST team may release more images from the telescope's various other instruments, in the coming days. Find higher resolution versions of the image, along with a more detailed description, in the source link below.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced it is accelerating space exploration and increasing self-sufficiency for astronauts by enabling real-time data processing with advanced commercial edge computing in space for the first time. Astronauts and space explorers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will speed time-to-insight from months to minutes on various experiments in space, from processing medical imaging and DNA sequencing to unlocking key insights from volumes of remote sensors and satellites, using HPE's Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2), an edge computing system.

Spaceborne Computer-2 is scheduled to launch into orbit on the 15th Northrop Grumman Resupply Mission to Space Station (NG-15) on February 20 and will be available for use on the International Space Station for the next 2-3 years. The NG-15 spacecraft has been named "SS. Katherine Johnson" in honor of Katherine Johnson, a famed Black, female NASA mathematician who was critical to the early success of the space program.

SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that with over 60 miles of InfiniBand cabling in place at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., a scientist was able to utilize 25,000 SGI ICE Intel Xeon processor cores on Pleiades to run a space weather simulation.

One particular area of study is magnetic reconnection, a physical process in highly conducting plasmas such as those that occur in the Earth's magnetosphere, in which the magnetic topology is rearranged and magnetic energy converted to kinetic or thermal energy. This field of research is critical, as these disturbances can disable wide scale power grids, affect satellite transmissions and disrupt airline communications.

NASA, Intel and SGI today announced the signing of an agreement establishing intentions to collaborate on significantly increasing the space agency's supercomputer performance and capacity. Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA will work closely with Intel and SGI to increase computational capabilities for modeling and simulation at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

For most people's computers, the microchips inside them are likely to fail after just a few hours, if not a few minutes, of use at high temperatures, leading to some quite extreme cooling solutions. However, scientists at NASA have managed to remove the need for complex cooling methods by designing a chip that can survive 1,700 hours of continuous operation at 500 degrees Celsius. Given that the average CPU would be considered to be running hot if it hit 60 degrees, this is quite an impressive achievement, which could pave the way for harsh-environment electronics. For example, it would allow computer-components to be located nearer to combustion chambers on space shuttles and rockets which could lead to more streamlined designs. More locally, these chips could potentially be used in environments such as oil and gas drilling, or even near to automotive engines, where relatively high temperatures are experienced.