Google will launch a small artificial intelligence computing satellite on Oct. 1 as part of Project Suncatcher, a test of how its chips perform in space.. The satellite, called MVP, will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and carry four tensor processing units, a setup Google says delivers roughly the computing power of a single data center server..
Google plans to use solar panels generating one kilowatt of power to run the hardware. The company expects the satellite to handle simple AI queries for one year, while the spacecraft is designed to remain in orbit for six years before re-entering the atmosphere.. The chips were tested for radiation exposure at Crocker Nuclear Laboratory before the launch.
Radiation can cause “bit flips,” which change binary values inside computer chips and disrupt their operation.. Google said it plans to restart the chips if those errors occur. The system also uses a cooling design with layers of conductive material to push heat into space, but the setup works for only about 15 minutes before the chips must be shut down to cool..
James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president for research, technology and society, told The New York Times the company does not expect operational AI data centers in space soon. “We don’t expect, to be perfectly frank, that we’ll have anything usefully operational in the next few years,” he said..
Brandon Lucia, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told The New York Times that moving from one satellite to a large orbital network would take years and substantial funding. “If you do this on a large scale, there are additional engineering problems,” he said..
The source material said those problems include radiation, cosmic rays that could damage semiconductor junctions, cooling limits and launch costs. A single Falcon 9 launch costs about $74 million.. Google plans to launch two similar satellites next year and ultimately aims to deploy 80 satellites flying in close formation to process AI queries.
The company is also considering a much larger satellite about the size of a football field.. Featured image credit. Tags: FeaturedGoogle
