Page 12: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (January 2021)

Government Update

Cosmic Rays: The Unseen Menace © Peter Jurik/Adobe Stock ost people are aware of risks inherent in our in- ers standing in the way of plans for interplanetary travel by creasingly electronic maritime industry. There crewed spacecraft. Cosmic rays also pose a threat to electron- is malware, ransomware, and spear phishing to ics placed aboard outgoing probes. In 2010, a malfunction

M name a few. But a new one has been recently aboard the Voyager 2 space probe was credited to a single identi? ed – cosmic rays. ? ipped bit. Fortunately, the satellite had plenty of room in

Cosmic rays are high-energy protons and atomic nuclei which to maneuver. Strategies such as physical or magnetic which move through space at nearly the speed of light. They shielding for spacecraft have been considered in order to min- originate from the sun, from stars outside of the solar system, imize the damage to electronics and human beings caused by and from distant galaxies. They are capable of penetrating cosmic rays. Flying 12 kilometers (39,000 ft) high, passen- and passing through almost any material. The vast majority gers and crews of jet airliners are exposed to at least 10 times of the time encounters with cosmic rays do little or no harm. the cosmic ray dose that people at sea level receive. Aircraft

But cosmic rays have suf? cient energy to alter the states of ? ying polar routes near the geomagnetic poles are at particular circuit components in electronic integrated circuits, causing risk. In the district of Schaerbeek in Brussels, one polling sta- transient errors to occur (such as corrupted data in electronic tion during the 2003 election registered more than 4,000 votes memory devices or incorrect performance of CPUs) often re- in favor of the Communist Party. The problem was that those ferred to as “soft errors”. This has been a problem in electron- 4,000 extra votes didn’t match up with the area’s population. ics at extremely high-altitude, such as in satellites, but with The Communist Party received “more votes than there were transistors becoming smaller and smaller, this is becoming an voters” at that polling station. Clearly, this posed a problem. increasing concern in ground-level electronics as well. Stud- The nation’s political identity was at stake. A detailed recount ies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically ex- resolved the cosmic-ray induced error.

perience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 mega- In 2008, data corruption in a ? ight control system caused an bytes of RAM per month. To alleviate this problem, the Intel Airbus A330 airliner from Australia to twice plunge hundreds

Corporation has proposed a cosmic ray detector that could be of feet, resulting in injuries to multiple passengers and crew integrated into future high-density microprocessors, allowing members. Cosmic rays were investigated among other pos- the processor to repeat the last command following a cosmic- sible causes of the data corruption. The other possible causes ray event. ECC memory is used to protect data against data were ultimately ruled out as being extremely unlikely, leaving corruption caused by cosmic rays. only cosmic rays.

Effectively cosmic radiation can ? ip a “1” in a computer It happened again in 2009. That year, Toyota issued a re- program’s binary code to a “0” or vice versa. That may not call on more than 9 million vehicles worldwide because of seem like much, but computers rely on an accurate set of bi- sudden and unintended acceleration, with people unable to nary instructions, which are made up of millions of ones and use their brakes because the controls were all computerized zeros. To a computer, 1 is a different instruction from zero. It (Toyota was ahead of the game at the time when it came to could be the electronic equivalent of ordering right full rud- vehicle technology). It was a pretty dramatic — and tragic — der when you meant left full rudder. In the open ocean with episode. People were killed. Someone was even released from plenty of sea room, that might not be a problem, but when ap- prison because the person had been wrongfully charged with proaching a narrow passage, it could be a disaster. running people over in a Toyota that accelerated uncontrol-

Galactic cosmic rays are one of the most important barri- lably. When experts dug into the problems with Toyota cars 12 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • January 2021

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