Our strategic partnership with Cosmic Shielding Corporation

NASA spacecraft are known for many things, but leveraging advancements in computing is not one of them. Even High Schoolers know that their TI-84 graphing calculator has a stronger processor than those used onboard the Apollo missions, and the Perseverance rover – which was launched in 2020 – still runs on a PowerPC750: an iMac processor from the 1990s.

The driving vision behind Aethero is to change that status quo. Aethero believes that any spacefaring civilization must find ways to enable advanced, computationally heavy tasks like edge processing in space.

Space is hard not just on humans, but on computers as well. Environmental factors like cosmic radiation are always particularly troublesome, and while older processors with larger transistor sizes are less susceptible to radiation-induced glitches and damage like single event upsets or latch-ups, faster, more advanced chips will fail quickly if deployed into orbit without protection.

Enter Cosmic Shielding Corporation, a company making a 3D printed material with a fittingly futuristic name of “Plasteel”. Made up of a polymer blend with a uniformly distributed layer of radiation-blocking nanoparticles, the material simultaneously reduces the overall dose of radiation received by the computer (which is commonly referred to as TID, or Total Ionizing Dose), but also limits (SEEs) “single event effects” – a phenomenon that occurs when ionizing particles damage or otherwise affect a circuit in space.

This shielding is perfect for protecting complex electronics like the NxN Edge Computing Module on Deimos, Aethero’s first demonstrator satellite that will launch to orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 mission later this month. The shielding on Deimos is the culmination of a six-month project during which Cosmic Shielding adapted its 3D-printed conformal shielding to fit within the NxN’s form factor, and this joint project is just the first step towards delivering new capabilities for onboard data processing and AI across space platforms for both government and commercial users.

Aethero and Cosmic Shielding Corporation look forward to a long and productive partnership in bringing about a new era of advanced edge computing in the space industry.

To learn more about Aethero, visit their website at https://www.aethero.com/ and follow the company on X and LinkedIn. 

For more information about Cosmic Shielding Corporation, visit their website at https://cosmicshielding.com/, and follow the company on X and LinkedIn.