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Michael D. Shaw is a biochemist and freelance writer. A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles and a protégé of the late 1960 Nobel laureate Willard Libby, Shaw also completed graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based in Virginia, it covers among other things technology, healthcare and entrepreneurship.
Before the space tourism industry took off and passengers began to put their electronics into orbit, it was best that travelers have a way to protect their digital data from the harsh space environment.
Between radiation and the effects of microgravity, a typical smartphone, tablet or laptop may not work properly until you have the opportunity to tweet your beautiful photos of the Earth. Add to that NASA's concerns about hackers intercepting communications and even controlling satellites in space. Our electronic devices and the data they contain become even more vulnerable. [Photos: The First Space Tourists]
If and when your personal electronic devices succumb to these spatial vulnerabilities, whether it's during a suborbital flight on SpaceShipTwo or an extended stay in a luxury hotel, there will probably be no expert in computer reside aboard your spaceship. And without a mobile device in working order, you'll have a hard time getting technical support on Earth.
How, then, do astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) send and save their data? In a word: carefully. According to Backup4all, which serves the space station's laptops, data protection is essential not only for the scientific and research experiments conducted by astronauts in the orbiting laboratory, but also for the information they see and share on social networks.
While the ISS orbits around the Earth 16 times a day (or approximately every 90 minutes), team members back up their data to 13 destinations, including external hard drives and the same vendors. Cloud storage that many of us use on Earth. These include Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive. These data involve experiments regarding cancer research, "cold flame extinction" and the use of a Robonaut under high stress conditions, among others.
If backup policies were not in place, NASA and its international partners at the space station could lose "critical and critical data, such as information on the health of the crew," State of the station systems, the results of scientific experiments on board, as well as each social media publication and interview, "said a NASA official in a statement. It would be difficult for NASA's public outreach to succeed without the breathtaking images of the space that the agency shares with its followers of social media. Imagine also the Twitter stream of the space station without its 2.3 million followers.
Now, imagine yourself without access to your own data and images. A faulty smartphone can be quite frustrating on Earth. But how would you feel if your smartphone stopped working when you were hundreds of kilometers away from the planet, which would prevent you, as a space tourist, from transmitting images and messages to Earth? You can avoid these future "world problems" by keeping the data backup tools at your fingertips.
Here on Earth, 140,000 hard drives are planting each week in the United States alone, according to the CSO.com cybersecurity news website. Recovering a failed computer can cost more than $ 7,500 without any guarantee of success. Worse, about 70 million smartphones are stolen each year, whether physically stolen or digitally hacked, according to a study by the Kensington Computer Products Group. The study found that the cost of losing a laptop or other mobile electronic device can far outweigh the cost of the device itself "due to the loss productivity, loss of intellectual property, data breaches and legal fees ".
The good news is that the ISS can be the ultimate symbol of data protection. It's already a symbol of the triumph of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
Translating this symbol into a call for action should be a national priority. Creating a call to action "is a design challenge, of course," said Janil Jean, director of LogoDesign.net's overseas operations. "However, this is not an insurmountable solution, not when it is easier, for the moment, to find a" no smoking "sign than to find a sign warning not to leave any data. vulnerable to loss or theft. "
I agree with this statement, just as I believe in the value of the mission of the ISS. This value has many denominations, ranging from the actual work that team members do every day to data that serves as a digital record of research that these men and women are doing on behalf of humanity.
We should follow their example by doing what is practical, which is also an intelligent thing: to treat data as a personal good and a public good too precious to be wasted, too powerful to be sacrificed and too powerful to be rendered – and it is also vulnerable in space as it is on the ground, if not more vulnerable.
Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Original article on Space.com.
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