Spaceborne: SpaceX new launch into international space station

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is all set to make a new addition into the International Space station.

The rocket that took of at 12:31PM ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida,will launch a supercomputer called Spaceborne, from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The Computer system is a joint project between HPE and NASA which aims to check the vulnerability of commercial computer in harsh space environment.

Mark Fernandez, the HPE engineer said that the space-bound computer is designed with an ability to make one trillion calculations in a single second.

The space station is placed in lower Earth orbit which makes it an unfavourable place for computers.The ISS is exposed to more radiation from solar flares and cosmic rays because of its presence outside the Earth's protective atmosphere.

In order to safeguard computers from this exposure they are shielded to make them physically "hardened" which can help in making them adaptable to higher radiation environment.

The project will be experimenting the regular "off- the -shelf" computers to examine their operation in space for longer time. These computers with upgraded software are designed to deal radiation exposure differently.

Running on open-source Linux operating system the computer is programmed to detect high-radiation event.

NASA said that the computerwill respond by throttling its systems and lowering its operating speed to save power and avoid damage.

The computer has passed 146 safety tests and certifications by NASA before the space travel, according to HPE. The system is expected to last for an year in the space station after which it will be compared to an identical computer that HPE will be monitoring on the ground.

Later, after the project works similar software hardened computers can be developed as critical tool for future deep space missions beyond Earth.