Help Wanted

No, I can't pay salaries yet, not even my own. But if you participate, and this gets built, you get a thinsat named after you. Perhaps you get some of the revenue from it. Maybe even root access to it. Maybe a job with a salary, someday. These things will only happen if server-sky gets paid for and built, and that will only happen if you contribute your unique skills and solutions to problems. The sooner, the better.

There is also a race against the clock. Server-sky can get held hostage to patents. The trolls will have a lot harder time securing patents if the solutions are in the public domain and prior art. Add your ideas to this wiki, and to the public domain, even if they are not fully developed. It may save millions of dollars (and hundreds of jobs) down the road.

Tasks (add more!):

• Writing and answering questions and e-mail

• Active circuitry radiation hardness
• Active circuitry shielding?
• Attitude control - will solar sailing suffice? Do we need torque rods and/or thrusters and/or wheels?
• Botany - test nighttime light sensitivity of different plant species
• Computing activity estimate
• Corals - test nighttime sensitivity of spawning cycles
• Cost/Benefit analysis
• Deployment separation
• Fault correction and redundancy (graceful degradation - recovering from failed satellite)

• Fundraising - companies who make servers and data centers could sponsor R&D effort

• Launch bus
• Launchers - equatorial preferred?
• LCD materials
• LCD radiation hardness
• LCD temperature cycling (20,000 cycles of 140K to 320K, perhap 400K during anneals)
• Predator/Prey - nighttime sensitivity, light up an acre at night, see what happens
• Radio antenna design
• Radio synthetic phased array design

• Solar cells - can SolarWorld or others handle thinned 12 inch (300mm) cells?

• USER REQUIREMENTS: We need to work on how the system will actually work as a data-center, and consider how data centers work today
• How much storage (volatile and non-volatile) does each satellite have ? Most data centers on Earth have lots of storage and databases
• How much RAM versus NRAM on each satellite? Non-volatile storage will probably be Flash
• Operating system: what will we use for an operating system? Something very novel will be needed, a highly distributed linux perhaps?
• Intersatellite link: how much bandwidth for the intersatellite links? What are the data buffering requirements? Will TCP/IP work?
• IP addresses: is IPv6.0 adequate for providing a large set of IP addresses to identify each satellite?
• Security: protection of confidential data: can the intersatellite links be hacked? Do we need an encryption layer ? (Major overhead?)