Skycorp And Phison The Moon And Mars Too!

Did You Know Perseverance Ran On An SSD?

Space exploration is difficult.  One major issue is that once you leave our atmosphere you are constantly bombarded by charged particles, which pose some danger to humans but can wreak havoc on electronics.  A single hit can flip a bit in mid calculation or even permanently destroy a part of the drive, and whatever happened to be stored there.  This is why it is interesting to hear that not only did the Mars Perseverance depend on a 8GB industrial-grade PSS4A111-8G uSSD, but that there will also be one on the moon soon.

Skycorp is the hardware provider to Lonestar Data Holdings who are using Phison to do a little out of this world project, sending a commercial solid-state drive from Phison to the moon next year and Ramon.Space will be using one for Israel’s Beresheet 2 lunar mission in 2025.  They will be used in the navigation systems, this is not just a test to send one up and see what happens; these SSDs are going to be a key component of the rovers and space craft.  There is also a Phison SSD on the International Space Station being used in an intelligent Space Systems Interface experiment.

This goes to show just how resilient Phison’s hardened industrial drives are, it will be very interesting to see how the commercial drive fares.  Radiation is usually deadly to high tech, but perhaps not for all of it!