Unfortunately, as a moon of Jupiter, Europa sits squarely in those radiation belts. Like Earth, Jupiter also has a liquid metal core that generates a magnetic field, producing radiation belts of high-energy protons and electrons from the impinging solar wind. But it all starts with electronics that can function in Europa’s extreme environment.Ĭressler and his students, together with researchers from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and the University of Tennessee (UT), demonstrated the capabilities of SiGe HBTs for this hostile environment in a paper presented at the IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference in July. NASA plans to launch the Europa Clipper in 2024, an orbiting spacecraft that will map the oceans of Europa, and then eventually send a landing vehicle, Europa Lander, to drill through the ice and explore its ocean. The researchers are in year one of a three-year grant in the NASA Concepts for Ocean Worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) program to design the electronics infrastructure for upcoming Europa surface missions. “You can build it for what you want it to do on Earth, and you then can use it in space.” “Due to the way that they're made, these devices actually survive those extreme conditions without any changes made to the underlying technology itself,” said Cressler, who is the project investigator. Cressler in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and his students have been working with silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors (SiGe HBTs) for decades and have found them to have unique advantages in extreme environments like Europa.
Exploring Europa could be possible in the coming years thanks to new applications for silicon-germanium transistor technology research at Georgia Tech. But with surface temperatures at -180 Celsius and with extreme levels of radiation, it’s also one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. Under 10 kilometers of ice is a liquid water ocean that could sustain life. Subsidizing Silicon: NASA and the Computer - Anthony J.Europa is more than just one of Jupiter’s many moons – it’s also one of most promising places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life.Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience - Chapter One - The Gemini Digital Computer: First Machine in Orbit - NASA.George Ludwig - The First Transistors in Space - Personal Reflections by the Designer of the Cosmic Ray Instrumentation Package for the Explorer I Satellite - Index A Transistor Museum Interview with Dr.George Ludwig - The First Transistors in Space - Personal Reflections by the Designer of the Cosmic Ray Instrumentation Package for the Explorer I Satellite. It was IBM's first completely silicon semiconductor computer. The first computer in space (and first computer in orbit) was the Gemini digital computer, built by IBM, which first flew in 1965. Sputnik-2 and Explorer 1 were the second and third satellites to orbit Earth, respectively. It was the first all-transistor satellite.Įxplorer 1 used a combination of germanium and silicon transistors. The Explorer I launch occurred on January 31st local time, which was actually February l Greenwich time, of 1958. Of course they had a much larger launch capacity and could carry vacuum tubes and their required batteries. Since then, I researched the question and found that, although the Soviets did not use transistors in Sputnik I, Sputnik II, launched in November 1957, did use a few transistors in one of its instruments. In my original interview I said that it was. Was the Explorer I the first earth satellite to carry transistor electronics? The first all-transistor satellite was Explorer 1, as explained by George Ludwig: The first transistors in space (and in orbit) were likely germanium, and they were aboard Sputnik-2 in 1957, though Sputnik-2 did use vacuum tubes as well.
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