Alphabet's Google is getting ready to send its artificial intelligence chips into space. The company said its Project Suncatcher team will launch a prototype satellite to see how its Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, perform in orbit.
The update came in a September 24 blog post from Travis Beals, a senior director on Google's Paradigms of Intelligence team. Google first announced Project Suncatcher last year as a long-term research project.
The goal is to find out if space could one day host large-scale machine learning systems. In low Earth orbit, satellites get near-constant sunlight and can produce up to eight times more solar power than panels on Earth.
Google said it may eventually be possible to link groups of satellites together. This would let them handle larger AI workloads while in orbit.
The First Test Flight
The prototype will fly on SpaceX's upcoming Transporter-18 rideshare mission. Google developed the satellite with Planet, a company that builds and operates Earth-imaging satellites.
The mission is designed to collect data on how the TPUs handle the stress of spaceflight. It will also measure how they deal with radiation and extreme temperatures.
A trip to low Earth orbit takes about 10 minutes. During that time, a spacecraft faces heavy vibration and forces up to 10 times the force of gravity.
Individual parts like TPU chips can face even greater forces of 50 to 100 g. Google shook the satellite on all three axes to copy a rocket launch, and the company said the hardware held up.
Testing for Radiation and Heat
Radiation is another challenge. Solar events and cosmic rays can damage electronics outside Earth's atmosphere.
Google tested its chips in a proton beam at the University of California, Davis's Crocker Nuclear Laboratory while they ran AI workloads. The team watched for errors such as bitflips.
Early results showed that Google's Trillium TPUs could survive a radiation dose greater than what they would receive during a five-year mission in space.
Cooling is also a problem. TPUs create a lot of heat in a small area, and there is no airflow in space to carry it away.
Google is testing a mix of heat pipes and radiators to cool the chips. The system has been tested in a thermal vacuum chamber on Earth, and the launch will show how it works in orbit.
Future satellites are expected to carry dozens of TPU chips each and fly in clusters. They will talk to each other using lasers that must work at very high bandwidth over short distances.
Google compared the precision needed to hitting a coin-sized target from miles away while both points are moving. The company plans to test this in 2027 by putting two satellites in orbit.
For now, Google said in its post that its first TPUs are scheduled to go into orbit the following week.
