ARM over the moon at space chip opportunity
Cambridge superchip designer ARM Holdings could soon have a microprocessor on the moon.
And their star trek quest is being aided by another UK company – RPC Telecommunications in Suffolk.ARM partner Nvidia Corp’s Tegra 3 platform is being used by team Synergy Moon in a bid to win the Google Lunar X-Prize challenge.
ARM tells Business Weekly, there are five Cortex-A9 processors in the Tegra 3 – four main cluster and one companion processor optimised for power – the same ones Nvidia uses in the Asus Transformer Prime. “So if it’s in for the moon shot then so are we,” says an ARM spokesman.
The international Lunar challenge is to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, travel 500m over the surface and send images and data back to Earth.
Synergy Moon has partnered with former Mars Rover Simulator scientist Martin Peniak, who plans to build an Nvidia Tegra based moon rover with autonomy of movement, programmed using the firm’s CUDA programming language. A launch date of December 2012 has been mooted.
More than 20 teams have already registered. Teams must be at least 90 per cent privately funded. The winning team will be awarded $20 million if the mission is achieved by December 31, 2012, after which the first prize reduces to $15 million.
One of the team leaders for Synergy Moon is Mark Posen – managing director and principal consultant of RPC Telecommunications Ltd in Ipswich.
Formerly with BT’s satellite division, Posen has substantial professional experience as head of the satellite telecoms industry and has been advising the team on how to access the necessary spectrum and the complex regulatory process.
RPC has carved a niche globally – one of Posen’s objectives when he left BT. He is very experienced in the interference management, international and national regulation and frequency coordination of satellite telecoms networks.
He is also an expert on the radio regulations and associated procedures of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). On behalf of a number of national telecoms administrations, he has been responsible for making and coordinating ITU satellite filings and providing representation at an international level, working in Australia and the Middle East as well as the US and Europe.
• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Generations of Rovers - picture courtesy NASA
