How have silicon chips contributed to space exploration?
Answer:
Silicon chips are cheap, resist great pressures or lack of pressure in this case, can control electrical currents, while keeping outside forces from destroying the current. Take alot more to break or damage it then most items. Overall silicon chips help alot, because most of the spacecraft is computer, and it requires alot of conducters, if there werent a chip such as this, you'll see rockets that are 2-3 times more costly, and less safe.
silicon chips are semiconductors used for several data processing works... regarding space data computation, it is most powerful resourse and inexpensive one.. as the circuit design is layed on boards, it saves space occupied, and it is light weight so it could be sent to space with minimum constraints taken into account.. for spacial telescopes, image processing at hardware level is carried out with these embedded semiconductor chips..
This question has been triple posted, so I'm only going to answer this particular one.
Integrated circuits are (or very close to being) an enabling technology for orbital boosters, and are an enabling technology for space exploration. In short we'd be going nowhere without them.
1. Von Braun is widely quoted as having said "We can beat gravity, but the paperwork is enormous." This is probably a reference to the huge amount of calculation and analysis that must go into a space mission. Plotting multi-year courses between planets where about 99% of the mission's total speed is gained in the first half hour is very difficult. Case-in-point: Mars Climate Orbiter. A Lockheed Martin program measured and calculated tiny forces on the spacecraft in pounds, and then gave them to a JPL navigation program which used them as newtons. The result was a 37km error on a course roughly four hundred million kilometres long. It was enough to destroy the craft.
2. The electronics on board the spacecraft: the 1997 Sojourner rover computer fits within the mass and power demand of a single WWII vintage vacuum tube.
3. Until gallium-arsenide came along, solar cells were made of silicon. Without photovoltaic cells, spacecraft would have had to use solar powered steam turbines. With the power demand of vacuum tubes, they would have needed it. Alas, a typical geostationary satellite would need several on-board crew members to keep such a system in operation, and would weigh several hundred tonnes, and have less capabability than one modern satellite transponder. One transponder can carry several HDTV channels, and each modern satellite has about 20 per tonne (including spares.) Oddly enough, the heart of each transponder is still a vacuum tube!!
4. Interplanetary navigation is typically done by radio ranging and Doppler measurements, which requires extraordinarily precise generation and measurement of radio frequencies. I don't know if semiconductor integrated circuitry is specifically required, but I do know that the required interferometrics run on microchips, and that the ability to do this comes from the same body of knowledge that generated the modern computer.
5. Without cheap consumer electronics, there wouldn't be enough of a market to bother launching the typical commercial satellite, especially if it had to weigh several hundred tonnes. Even if they didn't use microchips in their boosters, the commercial launch industry relies on the presence of cheap consumer electronics to provide a market for their services.
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