A curious aspect of space missions is how astronauts often depend on hardware that is not the most advanced, even outdated. An example is Artemis IImission in which the commander was seen Red Wiseman having configuration problems with Outlook on a convertible laptop Microsoft Surface Pro of 2013. The reason, in this and other cases, is that it is hardware that has gone through a rigorous certification and testing process which makes it a much better option than other more modern ones. But, from time to time, the equipment is updated, which is what is happening to the members of the Expedition 74on board the International Space Station since last December.
The POT has announced that its members are in a process of renewal of part of your computer equipment. The crew met on Friday to review plans for ‘replace the network servers first and then activate your new, more powerful laptops’. The model chosen by NASA is the mobile workstation HP ZBook Fury G9. It is not modest, exactly, but has a configuration that makes anyone’s teeth long.
As HP explains, the ZBook Fury G9 customized for the ISS includes a processor Intel Core Ultra 9 vPro HXa Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell GPU, 128GB memory DDR5 and four NVMe SSD of 2TB each.
Now, achieving certification of equipment for space is not easy. According to HP, ‘radiation exposure, intense vibrations during launch, extreme temperature fluctuations and the challenges of cooling in microgravity must be taken into account before hardware is cleared for orbit’.
The setup for the ISS also required an exclusive custom power adapter for NASA. ‘The ISS works mainly with DCwhile the electrical grid of homes and offices on Earth supplies AC. Therefore, laptops need a specific power adapter. G9 mobile workstations feature a specially designed AC/DC adapter that works both on the ISS and on Earth‘, says HP.
They replace the ZBook 15 G2
The laptops that astronauts now unpack arrived at the space station before them, on a cargo transport last October, to replace the ZBook 15 G2 that have been used since 2018. The ZBook Fury G9 are already the third generation of HP laptops since the first one arrived in 2014. HP states that there are currently more than 100 of its workstations in active use aboard the ISS, along with HP printers designed to work in microgravity.
The leap that the ZBook Fury G9 makes from the ZBook 15 G2 is notable. This is a laptop 15.6 inches with processors Intel Core i5/i7 fourth generation, up to 32GB of RAMstorage HDD either SSD from up to 2.2TB and professional graphics NVIDIA Quadro either AMD FireProin addition to the one integrated into the CPU. The casing of this customized version is made of magnesium alloy and its weight is based on 2.78kgwhich on Earth would be a lot for a laptop, but in microgravity conditions it matters much less.