A new innovation by NASA working together with KAIST (Korea Institute of Science and Technology) is of a starship which is made up of one silicon chip. This chip is going to be self-healing and more efficient than the ones made before. It will be able to endure strong radiations which will be faced during the voyage.
I4U reports that NASA is coming up with a self-healing starship because the silicon chip becomes damaged when there is radiation and so much heat. The chip is expected to be complete in 2020 and will be used in the starships.
The suggestion brought by calculating the ability of the chip is that it may be able to travel 1/5 of the light speed and also arrive to the closes star in about twenty years. This is 100x more than the current starship is able to do.
According to Spectrum.ieee, it is a really long period of time for a normal silicon chip to be in space for 20 years. This is due to the radiations with energy that is high that can be faced on the travel and also the unpredictable changes of hotness and coldness on earth.
The spaceship is made in such a way that after it encounters the radiations and is damaged by them, the device can heal itself with the use of heat from the Radiation. This is because there will be an additional connection to the transistors in the device that will fix the damages. The transistors designed by KAIST with a particular tool that allows only a certain amount of radiation while in the space.
The experimentations show that recovering from the damages will be possible for a lot of times. The memory flash could recover about ten thousand times while the DRAM can get back to a normal state in about 1012 times. This project may lead to increase of the demand for this self-healing technology in the future.
