PHISON, a well-known manufacturer of SSD drives, has announced that its products have been successfully installed on the Persevrance Markout, a spacecraft that landed on the Ezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. The spacecraft is using the industrial SSD PSS4A11-8G drive, which has a capacity of 8GB, and is being used to process, store, and transfer photographs taken from the 23 marshmallow cameras. After two years of work, the Persevrance has sent more than 166,000 pictures to Earth.
In addition to its work with the Persevrance, PHISON has also offered new details about the data storage system on the Markway. This system consists of the Intel Atom E3845 processor with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM, which has been installed on the Material board Compulab Comex IE38. The processor is responsible for receiving, compressing, and gluing images from the cameras. Two SSDs are connected to the motherboard: an 8GB PSS4A111-8G with the SATA interface and a 480GB NVMe SSD. Both drives have been designed to withstand extreme environmental conditions.
PHISON has also been involved in other space projects, such as the equipment for experiments on the International Space Station, where the company provided a 4TB SSD Phison E18, connected to the system on the Microchip Technologies Polarfire. In addition, SkyCorp has provided a server system based on RISC-V with 8TB SSD from PHISON for the lunar Data Center Lonestar Data Holdings. This SSD drive has been certified by NASA according to the level of readiness of the technology (TRL-6) to withstand extreme temperatures, vacuum conditions, and the load when starting the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Lonestar Data Holdings is a lunar data center that offers archiving and processing services. In April 2022, the center announced that it had signed contracts to launch a prototype of a data center on board two lunar landing modules financed by NASA, in collaboration with the Intuitive Machines Aerospace Company. As part of the IM-2 mission, a second nova-C module weighing 1kg, with 16TB memory, will be sent to the southern pole of the moon in 2023. The tiny experimental data center will store unchanged data for the early beta version of the center’s emergency recovery as a service (Disaster Recovery As a Service, Draas), working under the control of Ubuntu.