Southwest Research Institute^® (SwRI^®)  News

SwRI engineers significantly reduce the size of spaceflight computers

San Antonio -- November 20, 1995 -- Helping NASA make the most of shrinking budgets, Southwest Research Institute^® (SwRI^®)  has developed a family of miniaturized computers and instruments that are as much as 95 percent smaller than comparable systems.

Size and weight are critical factors in spaceflight missions, particularly affecting launch costs. The 5,000-pound Cassini satellite requires a Titan IV launch vehicle at $600 million. A 50-pound satellite, such as the Pluto Express, can be launched by a Delta vehicle at one-tenth the cost, $60 million.

To meet the requirements imposed by smaller spacecraft, SwRI funded an internal research and development program that has produced the first in a family of miniature 32-bit processing systems designed to control spaceflight systems and experiments. This Miniaturized Optimized Processor for Space, known as MOPS, is a mere 18 cubic inches (three by three by one-and-a-half inches) and delivers 25 million instructions per second. MOPS is a full-capacity, high-performance spaceflight computer comparable in power to current machines that are 300 cubic inches in size; MOPS is one-fifteenth that size, a reduction of almost 95 percent.

"To produce MOPS, we developed a novel packaging technique," Dr. Joseph Barfield, director of the Space Systems Department, told SwRI trustees at the 48th Annual Trustees Meeting November 20. "Because we needed the standard printed circuit board (PCB) surface area to mount chips, we developed a flexible PCB that is essentially folded into a tiny package." Unlike previous systems, these small boxes do not require a large, dedicated area of the spacecraft; they can be tucked into small spaces.

MOPS is one percent the size of the Institute's first spaceflight computer, the SC-1 developed in the early 1980s, and is 50 times more powerful. MOPS is under consideration for several future spaceflight missions. In addition, SwRI is using internal funding to develop small, low-cost and low-power space sensors. The Miniaturized Optimized Smart Sensor (MOSS), a small, low-power mass spectrometer, measures the mass and velocity of atoms and molecules, using less than one third the power of an equivalent instrument. The prototype is being evaluated for several NASA missions. In cooperation with Westinghouse, the Institute is developing an even smaller sensor, a mass spectrometer on a chip (MASC). MASC is expected to weigh less than 600 grams while providing the performance of instruments 10 times its size.

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