
Google NexusOne Can Survive a Hard Vacuum - wglb
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27123/?ref=rss
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lsc
The vacuum isn't what I'd worry about; I'd worry about the radiation.

I thought that space stuff usually used ancient CPUs because they had to be
rad-hard in ways that stuff beneath the ionosphere doesn't need to be, and
creating a sufficently rad-hard CPU was difficult and time consuming (thus you
end up with what was state of the art when you started working on it, some
time ago)

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sandGorgon
can you not put shielding AROUND the device, rather than build hardened
processors ?

I can think of one reason - increases weight of the whole package - but
perhaps the corresponding cost increase is not so much as buying a radiation
hardened 1Ghz processor.

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ericHosick
One of the interesting things is that there is some really high energy
particles running around in space. If you have a lot of shielding, you risk
these particles hitting that shielding causing a cascading effect making
things worse (My father designed satellites and we used to chat about this
stuff when I was a kid).

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throwaway32
Cool article about nanosatellites , but the HN title needs to be more
descriptive.

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ars
Nitpick: LEO is not a hard vacuum, it's a medium vacuum - it's not even
considered a high vacuum.

LEO has enough air that satellites experience noticeable drag and friction
from it.

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ars
The article mentions GPS, but doesn't US law require the GPS to disable itself
once reaching a certain speed and altitude?

I wonder how they get around that.

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nknight
No, US law requires no such thing.

Receivers capable of operating above 18km and 515 meters/sec are export
controlled, but then, so is cryptography software.

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s3b
Apparently they are not allowed to operate at altitudes higher than 60000 ft
and speeds greater than 1000 knots.

<http://blog.jgc.org/2010/11/gaga-1-cocom-limit-for-gps.html>

~~~
nknight
That blog entry fundamentally misunderstands the restriction.

The relevant document is available here:
<http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/mtcr>

Note that it refers to export controls, not any blanket ban on functionality.

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headShrinker
Sounds like they could have used a blackbox.

