NASA, Intermec Partner to Send RFID Into Space

By Jill Gambon

Feb. 2, 2007—NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center is teaming up with Intermec, a vendor of automatic-identification technologies, including bar-code equipment, mobile computers and RFID systems, to send RFID tags into space.

Under a partnership announced Wednesday, NASA and Intermec are collaborating on researching auto-ID technologies, including RFID and Data Matrix markings. Plans call for the inclusion of two or three different RFID tags in an experiment to be conducted later this year on the International Space Station. This, NASA says, will be the first time RFID tags have been exposed to the conditions present in space.

The RFID tags and other DPM materials will be mounted to a Passive Experiment Container (PEC), a suitcase-sized payload attached to the exterior of the International Space Station.

The goal of the experiments is to see how RFID tags and other identification technologies fare when exposed for an extended length of time to the environmental conditions of space. During a shuttle mission to the space station planned for July, NASA astronauts will mount aluminum briefcase-sized containers to the exterior of the spacecraft. The materials being tested will be inserted in coin-sized slots on the container for exposure to the conditions 350 kilometers above Earth. After several months in space, the materials will be retrieved and returned to Earth, where they will be analyzed and tested to gauge the impact of such things as atomic oxygen (individual oxygen atoms), ultraviolet radiation and micrometeorites.

Under the joint research agreement, Intermec will also evaluate the readability of identification markings on materials undergoing long-term exposure to space, as part of the Materials International Space Station Experiments (MISSE) 3 and 4, which were initiated last August. Those materials are still on the space station, and NASA astronauts are expected to return them to Earth within a few months.

Intermec will also prepare Data Matrix markings and supply both soft and rigid RFID tags for the MISSE 6 experiment, scheduled for a July launch. Fred Schramm, administrator of the Internal Research and Development Program at the Marshall Space Flight Center, says Intermec will use off-the-shelf products for the experiments. Intermec markets a variety of RFID tags, including two "Rigid" models designed to withstand harsh industrial conditions. Those products are passive UHF tags available in EPC Global Gen 2 and ISO 18000-6B versions.

"The idea is to find out how well commercial products survive and perform," says Larry Huseby, Intermec's director for public sector business development. "Test results could affect if and how NASA uses RFID in their missions."