Notebooks on the ISS

    When viewing photos and videos taken on the International Space Station, you can often notice that the interior of the station is teeming with laptops in special stands. How are they used in space?

    NASA engineer Robert Frost shared the answer to this question. When the station was just being designed, a wise decision was made not to use physical interfaces - they are too difficult to upgrade and repair. It’s much easier to put laptops, and if something happens to them, then the situation can be easily fixed by reinstalling programs, overwriting files or replacing a laptop. Laptops are much more accessible than specialized systems, so there will be no need to specifically relearn basic interaction.

    With the exception of critical systems, for example, ventilation valves, communication panels and some other devices, all control of the station is carried out using laptops. There are about 80 of them on the ISS, most of them are Lenovo Thinkpad T61P. Computers are not the most powerful: they have Intel Core Duo processors, up to 4 gigabytes of RAM can be put in this model. But there are some very old Lenovo A31p. To understand the age of these machines: their heart is the Pentium 4-M, a 2002 processor.

    The following is easy to count as advertising, but these are just facts. The ThinkPad is the only certified laptop to use on the ISS, Lenovo just loves to repeat it. The company is also proud that their laptops are the main ones at all world space agencies. ThinkPad laptops on the ISS have been used since the very beginning of the life of the station, since 1998. Since 1995, the ThinkPad has flown into space on shuttles more than 50 times.

    Lenovo is a Chinese company. With all the sinophobia of American authorities, there is nothing strange about this: the ThinkPad brand at the time of the conclusion of the contract belonged to IBM (a corporation from the USA), but was sold in 2005. It is likely that in the future there will be more problems with regulatory authorities due to the country of origin of laptops.

    Computers for sending into space undergo a variety of tests: radiation, temperature, atmosphere, flammability. They are covered with Velcro for fastening. In addition, a number of changes have been made to their cooling systems: hot air does not rise up under microgravity conditions, and air density is different. The laptop comes with an adapter for power from the on-board network of 28 volts DC.

    The installed software depends on the task at hand. In the US segment, control takes place with machines called PCS (Portable Computer System, a portable computer system). Usually there are 7. Linux is running on laptops; work is done through the 1553 standard bus as a remote terminal.

    There are about the same number of laptops in the Russian segment that NASA simply calls “Russian laptops”. On them, too, is spinning an OS based on the Linux kernel. These laptops control the Russian elements of the station.

    PCS and Russian counterparts have their own graphical interfaces that depict the ISS. To control it, just click on the station module, and then select the required item. Interfaces are different, but they are not so difficult to learn, and rarely do anything in a foreign system.

    There is no single user interface: 8 laptops from the Japan Aerospace Research Agency, which are in Japanese modules, and two European laptops have their own system. There are also about a dozen different laptops for various operations.

    The remaining laptops are integrated into a computer network. These machines are called Station Support Computers (SSC, computers for station support), and they work under Microsoft Windows. According to Frost , more than half of the laptops on board work under Windows, but they are not allowed on the 1553 system. The purpose of these computers is taking notes, sending emails, conducting video conferences, blog entries and microblogging, viewing data, taking an inventory.

    If you look at the picture before kat (it is clickable and has a size of ≈3.5 MiB), then you can see three laptops at once. Closest to the head, Shannon is used to monitor the procedure that she performs.

    The one above and to the right is one of the SSC computers (computers for personal use), probably she reads the work schedule from it. Judging by the desktop screen saver, it has Windows XP SP2 installed. It was the ISS-24 expedition, 2010, and Service Pack 3 was released back in May 2008. Speaking of security: in 2008, the worm W32.Gammima.AG got to the station’s computers due to a flash drive. In 2013, a migration was carried out from Windows XP to Debian 6.

    In the lower right corner of the photo there is one of the PCS computers for managing the station. It seems that the astronaut has switched to the gateway page. There are no emergency warnings, there is only a message about small communication problems of the power management system.

    The photo is also interesting for several interfaces of the ISS itself: above the hatch there is a warning system panel, to the right of Shannon's face is a radio and intercom system. Several monitors in front of her using cameras overboard the station show the process of working with the manipulator.


    Status screen with an overview of the main indicators of the integrated system of the American MCS and the Russian VESS (traffic control and navigation systems). From here, the crew can control any device of the navigation systems and station position and set the operating modes of the software and hardware of the engines. Of course, the command of the Russian segment is carried out from Russian laptops.

    Some paperwork documents are available on SpaceRef .

    Also popular now: