Testing products in space.

[UncleDave]

We just had a product return from a 5 year stint on the ISS.

Zero failures 100% uptime.

We call this the HA5 and its one of our most popular products.
It converts signals from HDMI to 3Gig SDI.

Pretty happy for the team.

 

[aquariuscsm]

I find space and space travel fascinating!!

 

[ABN_CBT_ENGR]

I find space cool and interesting too.

UD, question for ya.

Was this a test of some kind or just manufactured equipment on the ISS?

I ask that because I'm curious as to what condition(s)/Environment it was exposed to up there that it would not see ( or the extreme as in space) which would test a parameter?

Thanks

 

[UncleDave]

The was a NASA project called the High Definition Earth Viewing payload.
It was designed to test the viability of commercially based cameras for extreme duty.

This box was assembled by NASA and mounted externally to the ISS, but sealed and pressurized so it didnt have to deal with a vacuum but had to remain operable in a fairly cold environment and of course consume low power and work continuously from day 1.
I dont recall the exec spec to be totally honest but there were sets of shock, temp, and voltage over under parameters it had to meet.

Our product is off the shelf but very high quality (comparatively expensive) and they end up in a surprising number of places we never originally planned for.

We've been working with the various space agencies a while on a variety of equipment, they have been using for all kinds of things most of which they won't tell us. Our best selling product to the various agencies that we know about is a high res multi channel recorder.

 

[ABN_CBT_ENGR]

impressive, congratulations

This box was assembled by NASA and mounted externally to the ISS, but sealed and pressurized so it didnt have to deal with a vacuum but had to remain operable in a fairly cold environment and of course consume low power and work continuously from day 1.

 

[JimPghPA]

Interesting. In space mounted outside, radiation damage to components is one of the things I would be most concerned about if reliability was one of the goals. I know that the electronics in hospitals that is in the rooms where radiation is used to treat cancer patients, has a much higher rate of failure. It would be interesting to know if error detection and correction, and or redundancy was used in different sections of it.

 

[ABN_CBT_ENGR]

UD, if you can address this ( not asking to violate any NDA or confidentiality statement) but Jim brought up a good point.

Were they testing it against radiation, EM spectrum or other energy reactions or other items on the electronics?

 

[UncleDave]

UD, if you can address this ( not asking to violate any NDA or confidentiality statement) but Jim brought up a good point.

Were they testing it against radiation, EM spectrum or other energy reactions or other items on the electronics?

Radiation and em rejection was definitely part of the test, as was the devices quietness in terms of emissive radio frequency.

All these conditions are made harder on the device when removed from its case. In many cases box shields a lot of sins in either direction.

Heres our press release.

https://www.aja.com/news/user-stories/771

 

[y_p_w]

Interesting. In space mounted outside, radiation damage to components is one of the things I would be most concerned about if reliability was one of the goals. I know that the electronics in hospitals that is in the rooms where radiation is used to treat cancer patients, has a much higher rate of failure. It would be interesting to know if error detection and correction, and or redundancy was used in different sections of it.

I wouldn't worry so much about damage to the components. They can usually handle it without **permanent** damage. The worst thing for long term reliability of integrated circuits is "electromigration", where the movement of electrons over time results in wire trace metals moving. Ultimately they'll disconnect, but even before then when the resistance goes up it might stop working. Here's a photo that shows how little bits started moving away.

The biggest issue would be soft errors - where something like particle radiation might end up flipping a bit somewhere. There are ways to alleviate it. Error correction is one way, but that's not necessarily practical outside of memories or storage. When I've talked to people working with electronics going into space, they mentioned that they tended to use older, radiation-hardened processes where it might be less susceptible to radiation. It might be silicon on sapphire or silicon on insulator, where there's less silicon "bulk" that might absorb particle radiation. Only a really thin layer of silicon is needed for electronic operation, but there has to be a certain thickness just for mechanical strength. I talked to someone who was sending electronics into space, and he indicated that they also use shielding.

 

[UncleDave]

Interesting. In space mounted outside, radiation damage to components is one of the things I would be most concerned about if reliability was one of the goals. I know that the electronics in hospitals that is in the rooms where radiation is used to treat cancer patients, has a much higher rate of failure. It would be interesting to know if error detection and correction, and or redundancy was used in different sections of it.

The device itself in a sense rebuilds and equalizes for cable length of the incoming HDMI signal then rebuilds and "re-clocks" the output using a pll filter so the outbound signal and cable can run for maximum length with low jitter.

Device otherwise has zero redundancy, but was engineered for rough treatment, has been tweaked for about a decade and improved upon by examining failures.

It also tested twice - one on an automated rig, the if it passes it moves to a human that checks the functionality and every input output by hand. After these two tests its boxed and shipped.

 

[John Done]

Space is a perfect place for taking a different kind of experiments such as printing biomaterial and tools using 3D print. Now, NASA wants to use 3D printers to create Moonbase and some of the details of spacecraft. But as for now, space companies use the ordinary way of spacecraft building - for the orbital insertion vehicle which is a capable and versatile orbital insertion vehicle, which enables Skyrora to deliver your payload or group of payloads to the right where you want them.

 

[ZeeOSix]

The was a NASA project called the High Definition Earth Viewing payload.
It was designed to test the viability of commercially based cameras for extreme duty.

This box was assembled by NASA and mounted externally to the ISS, but sealed and pressurized so it didnt have to deal with a vacuum but had to remain operable in a fairly cold environment and of course consume low power and work continuously from day 1.
I dont recall the exec spec to be totally honest but there were sets of shock, temp, and voltage over under parameters it had to meet.

Was it pressurized with nitrogen? Keeping it pressurized would help reduce any possible electrical issues caused by possible corona discharge (if any high voltage components in the box) and tin whiskers problems on those circuit boards.

From your other link, looks like it's hanging out on the end of an ISS module, and painted white and using some thermal blanketing for thermal control.

It would most likely have had to go through some thermal vacuum qualification testing for thermal balance (typically in a LN2 cooled vacuum chamber with solar simulation), but there are other ways to simulate solar loads on the hardware in a cold vacuum chamber without an actual solar simulator.

 

[Pablo]

Cool that you can take and post pictures. I couldn't do that. I worked on space black boxes since I was 25! (62 and retired now) First was Gen1 GPS satellites. Usually power, but some RF (RFU and RFDU). The last 15 years power for electric propulsion and assist propulsion (HCT and PCU, EPCU) for hall current and arcjet thrusters. Yes mostly everything rad hard. Always in the harshness of space, the products lasted longer than the 10-15 year mission life expected. HiRel space electronics is a lot of old school knowledge mixed with modern process control. Of course severe material control requirements. No pure tin, no sublimating metals - Cd, Zn, Hg etc, no polymers that cold flow, low to no outgassing polymers only (funny most of this for obvious reasons - and to keep material off camera lenses and sensors!)

 

[UncleDave]

Was it pressurized with nitrogen? Keeping it pressurized would help reduce any possible electrical issues caused by possible corona discharge (if any high voltage components in the box) and tin whiskers problems on those circuit boards.

From your other link, looks like it's hanging out on the end of an ISS module, and painted white and using some thermal blanketing for thermal control.

It would most likely have had to go through some thermal vacuum qualification testing for thermal balance (typically in a LN2 cooled vacuum chamber with solar simulation), but there are other ways to simulate solar loads on the hardware in a cold vacuum chamber without an actual solar simulator.

They don't tell us much - but it would make sense to fill the module with some inert gas.
Nitrogen, or some nitrogen argon combo seems an obvious choice.

 

[UncleDave]

Cool that you can take and post pictures. I couldn't do that. I worked on space black boxes since I was 25! (62 and retired now) First was Gen1 GPS satellites. Usually power, but some RF (RFU and RFDU). The last 15 years power for electric propulsion and assist propulsion (HCT and PCU, EPCU) for hall current and arcjet thrusters. Yes mostly everything rad hard. Always in the harshness of space, the products lasted longer than the 10-15 year mission life expected. HiRel space electronics is a lot of old school knowledge mixed with modern process control. Of course severe material control requirements. No pure tin, no sublimating metals - Cd, Zn, Hg etc, no polymers that cold flow, low to no outgassing polymers only (funny most of this for obvious reasons - and to keep material off camera lenses and sensors!)

Sounds fulfilling - we dont build anything for them.

What we can talk about varies a lot with Nasa and the various "space agencies".
Sometimes they could care less and actually provide info to us - like that picture.
Other times our stuff goes into a black hole and all we get are cryptic support calls.

About 15 years ago we did a bunch a work at Vandenberg AFB when I was at Autodesk.
The film grain, dust and dirt analysis part of our color corrector was designed to work with scanned 35 and 65MM film and was exceptionally good at being able to see movement in the desert over long duration and correlate them to time of day.

I became friends with the video crew there and was invited to be in the control room VIP area during some launches and was able to invite a friends young space crazy kid to watch a Delta IV heavy launch. It was a "super Uncle Dave" moment.