NASA Sends Supercomputer to ISS to Prep for Mars Manned Mission

NASA has sent a supercomputer to the International Space Station, in a bid to accelerate its mission to put humans on Mars.

The supercomputer, known as the Spaceborne Computer, was launched aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, propelled by a reusable Falcon 9 rocket booster, on Monday, August 14.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk shared a video of the Falcon 9 rocket taking off and landing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on his Twitter account .

Dragon will arrive at the ISS on August 16, when crew members Jack Fischer and Paolo Nespoli will use the station’s 57.7-foot robotic arm to reach out and capture the spacecraft and attach it to the station.

The goal is to see whether the Spaceborne Computer can operate faultlessly in the harsh conditions of space for one year – roughly the same amount of time it would take humans to travel to Mars.

(Image: Flickr/spacex)

While aboard the ISS, it will be used to make calculations needed for space research projects – calculations that are currently done on Earth due to the limited computing capabilities in space.

This will be important on manned mission to Mars, as the distance between the two planets means it will take up to 20 minutes for communications to reach Earth, and another 20 minutes for responses to reach astronauts.

Such a long communication lag would make on-the-ground exploration challenging and potentially dangerous, if astronauts are met with any mission-critical scenarios that they’re not able to solve themselves.

A manned mission to Mars will therefore require sophisticated onboard computing resources that are capable of extended periods of uptime.

Read more at www.mirror.co.uk

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