From AMD to Artemis II: Accelerating the next era of space exploration

When the four astronauts splashed down in NASA’s Orion spacecraft earlier this year, the Artemis II mission was hailed a success. Not only does it open future opportunities to the Moon and perhaps Mars, but it was also a testament to the powerful technology fuelling the spacecraft.

Critical to that success was AMD, which provided radiation-tolerant, space-grade computing technology to power essential data routing and image processing on the Orion spacecraft.

While he couldn’t go into the specifics, AMD space solutions architect Ken O’Neill shared with us what it takes to put a chip into a human-rated spacecraft.

“NASA doesn’t cut any corners when it comes to human safety,” he explained. “For that reason, the parts are screened, qualified and tested before they leave AMD and go to the system integrators.”

He added: “Four people’s lives depended on everything working correctly up there.”

The technology behind space exploration

The components used were introduced to the market roughly a decade ago and are also being used on the Mars Curiosity Rover and NASA’s Europa Clipper space probe. O’Neill said this timeline is standard for Class A space missions, which are defined by their scale, visibility or if it’s a human-rated programme.

“The time between making a design decision through to building the flight systems takes a long time, which is why it’s not our newest technology,” O’Neill explained. “Typically, these components are used for image processing types of applications – they have an uncommitted amount of programmable logic resource and transceivers that will transmit and receive data.”

O’Neill explained AMD’s Virtex 5 family of parts has a significant space heritage – with the NASA Europa Clipper mission using the same parts, as it makes its way towards the moons of Jupiter.

“There’s speculation in scientific circles that Europa has very deep water lakes, kept warm by thermal energy from the inside of that moon,” O’Neill said. “There’s a deep layer of ice over the top, but underneath the ice there’s actually liquid water, which potentially could be home to life. The Virtex 5 parts are part of that mission.”

The potential for autonomous space exploration

Lunar space is a huge growth area for companies like AMD. These deployments highlight the importance of resilient, low-power compute platforms that are capable of autonomous operations.

AMD works to deliver the flexibility and reliability required for long-duration space programmes, with Blue Origin for example sharing that it uses AMD Versal AI Edge Gen 2 adaptive SoCs in its development flight computers. These are currently flying in the vehicle testbed that will eventually power the Mark 2 lander that will land astronauts on the moon as early as 2028.

Likewise, NEC is building Japan’s first optical communication satellite constellation with AMD technology.

While Artemis was about bringing humans back to the moon, there are plenty of other programmes beyond human-rated ones, including exploration, surveying, scientific and potentially commercial missions.

AMD’s role in these missions is perhaps a reminder that space exploration relies on the infrastructure built to support it.

“The lunar environment is harsh,” O’Neill added. “There’s no magnetosphere to protect against radiation on the surface and the temperature extremes on the surface are incredibly harsh.

“Having the highest quality assurance levels to support commercial, scientific and human-rated missions that go to the moon is therefore very significant.”

Capacity’s full interview with Ken O’Neill will be in the Datacloud Global Congress edition of Capacity Magazine, which will be available online in June.

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