3 Pitt projects were in space at the same time, a rare university milestone

The farther people travel from Earth, the more hostile the environment becomes, not only for people, but also for the computers we rely on to collect samples, perform experiments and even keep us alive.

One of the biggest threats is exposure to cosmic radiation. These tiny, highly charged particles can harm DNA and increase the risks of cancer. They can also wreak havoc on run-of-the-mill computer hardware.

Students in the lab of Alan George, founder and director of the NSF Center for Space, High-performance and Resilient Computing (SHREC), have developed computers that compensate for progressively higher levels of radiation exposure. In doing so, they reached a milestone that has rarely, if ever, been achieved by a university: Last year, they had three successful projects operating in three areas of space at the same time: Low Earth orbit (LEO), geosynchronous orbit (GEO) and on the Moon.

“It’s very rare to have successes in all of those three domains, let alone in the same year,” said George, who is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering.

The successful projects

In LEO, 250 miles above Earth: Developed at SHREC, the Configurable and Autonomous Sensor Processing Research System (CASPR), a combination of space computers and sensors, has been operating on the International Space Station since 2022. From space, CASPR has collected detailed pictures of Earth; it can image roads and houses and even planes taxing on a runway.

In GEO, 22,000 miles above Earth: Students at SHREC developed applications to improve imaging efficiency on a Lockheed Martin CubeSat satellite. They designed a machine learning model that reduces image file sizes and categorizes them, discarding redundancies and overcoming memory constraints inherent in small, space-resilient computers.

On the Lunar surface: 239,000 miles from Earth: The NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSOLO) adopted a SHREC-designed hybrid computing system for the core of an instrument used to analyze chemicals on the Moon’s surface. Unlike most space technology, which is radiation-hardened, the hybrid system uses both conventional and radiation-hardened components, resulting in reliable systems that are higher performing, less expensive and lightweight.