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Wednesday, June 30, 2021

From Mars to the moon, Chinese Kylin computer operating system

China reveals the computer system powering its space missions.

Chinese researchers developed the Kylin operating system to replace the Western products the country relied on. Sending it into space meant combining security, reliability and performance, engineers say. — SCMP

From Mars to the moon: the computer system behind China's space missions.

WHETHER it is China’s rover on Mars, its space station orbiting the Earth or its moon probe bringing back lunar samples, one littleknown system is behind them all.

The core of the Kylin computer operating system has been guarded as a national secret and its use in the country’s space programme has only just been officially confirmed.

Its main codes were written by Chinese military researchers, according to developer China Electronics Corporation (CEC), but it also includes elements of Unix-like software FREEBSD, parts from Linux, and a user interface similar to Windows.

It is a hybrid, like the mythical qilin dragon beast it is named after.

Speaking to state media, members of the Kylin development team revealed the role the operating system played in these missions, coordinating communication between artificial intelligence software, human controllers on the ground and all the hardware on board the spacecraft.

Until about a decade ago, China, like most other countries, relied on Linux and Windows to drive its space programmes, according to a paper published in domestic journal Space Industry Management last year.

From 2008, China’s space authorities started to replace Western software and hardware in satellites and spacecraft.

The process sped up after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about US hacking activities.

Kylin was one of the results – along with the Zhanxing, or Warring Star, system developed by the Chinese military’s space force, according to the paper.

Dan Jianqun, a lead scientist with CEC’S Kylin project, said China had no other choice but to develop its operating system.

“Using other people’s systems, to quote President Xi (Jinping), is like building a house on other people’s land.

“It can be large and beautiful, but it can also be destroyed overnight,” he said in an interview on state television.

The transition from western to home-made software was full of challenges, according to some of the software engineers involved.

Liu Jun, a software engineer on the Kylin team, said space missions required not only high security, but reliability and performance.

The Kylin OS system is used in China’s space programme. Photo: CCTV

Liu said Kylin was initially developed for computers on the ground.

To go to space, processing times on certain tasks had to be cut to less than a third, he told the state television.

“It was as difficult as compressing a packet of biscuits into a few grams without losing any nutrition,” Liu said.

The space mission sometimes also required the operating system to execute a specific task without being distracted by lower priorities, and many codes were written to meet these needs, said Liu.

Kylin’s first tests were demanding. No one had landed on the far side of the moon. And no country had put a rover on Mars without failure.

Liu Hongyu, another Kylin engineer, said the team was under extreme stress when these missions reached a critical stage. “We were just praying. When the spacecraft landed, the whole building rocked with applause,” he said. Kylin is now the most widely used operating system in the Chinese government and military, according to previous state media reports. When its first version was released in 2006, the system came under a lot of criticism for its poor user experience and its lack of compatible software.

But Kylin worked well with domestically developed computer chips such as the Loongson CPU. As the Chinese government began replacing Intel chips and Windows systems in the military, government, banks and other sensitive sectors, the Kylin user base grew rapidly.

But some challenges remained. One issue was hardware adaptability. China still used a lot of scientific equipment from the West and many devices were not compatible with Kylin. In addition, most software on the Kylin system is displayed in Chinese.

Any foreign astronauts planning to take up China’s offer to visit its space station will need to learn some Chinese or they will be confused by the characters on the screen of every Kylin device, including the tablets. – South China Morning Post

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Monday, May 17, 2021

China’s Zhurong sends back signals, marking success of Tianwen-1's landing on Mars

Tianwen-1 successfully landed on Mars Infographic: GT

A review of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars exploration mission

Tianwen-1, China’s first interplanetary expedition, has spectacularly conquered a new major milestone, with its lander-rover combination successfully soft-landing at the planned site in the southern part of a vast plain known as Utopia Planitia on Mars on early Saturday morning, Global Times learned from the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent warm congratulations and sincere greetings to the personnel involved in the Saturday feat.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in his congratulatory letter that this success marks a major step forward in the country’s interplanetary exploration, achieving a leap from Earth-moon system to the interplanetary one. Leaving the footprint of Chinese people on Mars for the first time marks another milestone of the country’s space industry development.

Xi also noted that the country will always remember the contributions and achievements of the participants of the mission, stressing that it is their courage to challenge and pursue excellence that has brought the country to a leading position in the world in terms of interplanetary exploration.

Screen of Beijing flight control center shows the landing site of Tianwen-1 on Saturday. Photo: Zhang Gaoxiang/ CNSA

According to the CNSA, Tianwen-1 probe lowered its altitude from the Martian parking orbit around 1 am Saturday, before its lander-rover combination separated with the orbiter around 4 am. The lander-rover combination then took another flight of three hours before its entry into Mars atmosphere.

The Chinese spacecraft, after entering the Mars atmosphere, spent around nine minutes decelerating, hovering for obstacle avoidance and cushioning, before its soft landing on the designated landing site at the Utopia Planitia, CNSA said.

The orbiter rose and returned to the parking orbit 30 minutes after the separation, to provide relay communication for the landing craft combo, the Chinese space agency said.

Photo: Coutersy of CAST Photo: Coutersy of CAST

CNSA underscored that it has conducted cooperation with a range of international aerospace organizations and countries including the Europe Space Agency, Argentina, France and Austria, throughout the implementation of its Tianwen-1 Mars mission.

The smooth landing of the Tianwen-1 probe marked that China has become the third nation that has achieved such a feat, following Russia and the US.

The successful touchdown of Tianwen-1 took place on the 295th day of its journey after it was launched and sent into planned orbit via a Long March-5 carrier rocket from Wenchang Spaceport in South China’s Hainan Province on July 23, 2020.

The whole entry, descent and landing (EDL) of Tianwen-1 took around 9 minutes, during which the speed of the craft was reduced from 20,000 kilometers per hour to zero, according to the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) the developer of the lander-rover combo of Tianwen-1.

The EDL of the Chinese craft first involved an aerodynamic decelerating stage before it deployed parachute and variant thrust engine systems.

Timeline of China's first Mars exploration mission Infographic: GT Timeline of China's first Mars exploration mission Infographic: GT

Such an aerodynamic decelerating stage reduced the craft's speed by some 90 percent, and then the parachute stage helped it further decelerate to some 100 meters per second before the thrust engine systems were turned on to enable the craft to enter a hovering stage as it reaches some 100 meters above the surface, said Wang Chuang, the chief director-designer of the Tianwen-1 probe with the CAST.

“At the hovering stage, the six instruments on board the rover, including microwave sensors to determine speed and distance and optical cameras, were started simultaneously in order to ‘search for a safer’ spot for the soft landing,” he explained.

Chinese space industry insiders told the Global Times on Saturday that although Tianwen-1 has inherited mature hovering and obstacle avoidance technology from the previous Chang’e-3,-4, and -5 lunar probe missions, there are still plenty of new challenges in its Mars landing attempt.

Currently, the success rate of humanity’s Mars landings is only below 50 percent, and most failed attempts happened at the EDL stage. “It took an extremely accurate operation of a range of technology, including aerodynamic shape design, parachute and engine, to achieve [the] soft landing on Mars. There is no room for defiance of even one second on any single system,” Sun Zezhou, the Tianwen-1 designer-in-chief with the CAST, noted.

Photo: Coutersy of CAST Photo: Coutersy of CAST

Compared to the moon, Mars is first and foremost much further from Earth, which results in an inevitable communication delay of some 20 minutes. It means that Tianwen-1 is very much on its own in the landing process, CAST experts said.

Also, although the density of Mars’ atmosphere is only 1 percent of Earth’s atmosphere, it causes a more complicated environment for landing than a touchdown on the moon, as there is no atmosphere on the Earth’s closest celestial neighbor, they added.

“We did not have first-hand data on the Mars atmosphere… which means we were put in an entirely unknown environment. One can imagine the level of difficulty,” Chen Baichao, chief director-designer of the rover system with the CAST.

China has adopted a unique trajectory-elevation plan based on trim-wing design to resist the risks of uncertainty brought by the Mars atmosphere, according to the CAST.

Named after an ancient fire god of Chinese mythology, the 1.85-meter-tall and some 240-kilogram Zhurong Mars rover will then be deployed. It is designed to rove the planet for at least 3 Martian months, approximately 92 days on Earth.

Infographic:Global Times Infographic:Global Times

In total, six scientific payloads – a pair of navigation and terrain cameras, a multispectral camera, a Mars surface composition detector, a penetrating radar, a mast-mounted magnetometer and a Mars climate station – were installed on Zhurong to study the topography, geology, soil structure, minerals and rock types and atmosphere in the area.

To survive the notoriously harsh sand storm on Mars’ surface, speed of which could reach 180 meters per second, about three times stronger than that of a super typhoon on Earth, Chinese engineers have developed a new material for Zhurong, enabling it to resist dust stains and shake off the dust, if any, by vibration.

Also, when the Mars rover encounters complicated situations on its drive path, Chinese scientists will conduct a simulation test on Earth with a 1:1 Zhurong model in the lab first, before they send instructions to the rover, Global Times learned from the CAST.

The technology used in the landing is based on China's successful human spaceflight and lunar missions, Andrew Jones, a Finland-based space observer who follows China's space industry, told the Global Times. "They haven't tested this altogether, but they have had the experience of dealing with these technologies."

What China is doing in the Tianwen-1 expedition is “extremely challenging and impressive,” said Jones.

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