While we watched NASA put a rover on Mars last month it definitely looked like the agency had to use a kind of high-technical processor in his machine. The rover it sure is built on something much more powerful than the components in devices our citizens use, right? But while NASA technically uses a specialized processor to drives the Perseverance Rover, it is not far removed from the world of consumer electronics– about 23 years ago.
NewScientist reports that the Perseverance Rover is powered by a PowerPC 750 processor, used in Apple’s original 1998 iMac G3 – you remember, the iconic, colorful, transparent desktop. If the PowerPC name sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s the RISC processors that Apple used on its computers before switching to Intel. (Although the company now back on the RISC train with its homemade M1 processor.)
The PowerPC 750 was a single-233MHz processor, and compared to the multi-core 5.0GHz frequencies that modern consumer chips can reach, 233MHz is incredibly slow. But the 750 was the first to incorporate dynamic branch forecasting, which is still used in modern processors today. The CPU architecture basically makes a guess as to what instructions the CPU is going to process as a way to improve efficiency. The more information is processed, the better the chip at preaching.thing to do next.
However, there is a big difference between the iMac’s CPU and the one in the Perseverance rover. BAE Systems manufactures the radiation hardened version of the PowerPC 750, dbuilt-in RAD750, which can withstand 200,000 to 1,000,000 Rade and temperatures between -55 and 125 degrees Celsius (-67 and 257 degrees Fahrenheit). Mars does not have the same kind of atmosphere as Earth protects us from the sun’s rays, so one flashes sunlight and it’s all over for the Mars Rover before his adventure can begin. Ebut one food more than $ 200,000, so extra protection is needed.
G / O Media can get a commission
“A charged particle chasing through the galaxy can move through a device and wreak havoc,” James LaRosa of BAE Systems told NewScientist. “It can literally unleash electronically; it can cause electronic noise and signal points within the circuit. ”
But why use a processor old enough to remember when Eve 6 released their first album? It has nothing to do with cost—those old processors are best for the job because they are reliable. NASAThe Orion spacecraft, for example, used the same RAD750 processor.
‘Compared to the [Intel] Core i5 in your laptop, it’s much slower … iIt’s probably not faster than your smartphone, ”said Matt Lemke, deputy director of Orion’s aviation, of NASA. tell The Space Overview back in 2014. ‘But it’s not just about speed like robustness and reliability. I have to make sure it will always work. ”
Given this, it is reasonable that NASA would choose older technology over the new stuff. After all, if you spend $ 2.7 billion to land a robot on Mars, it’s important that your technology is reliable enough to stand the test of time –down to the smallest soldered circuits. Currently, the RAD750 orbits about 100 satellites around the earth, which includes GPS, image and weather data, as well as various military satellites. According to LaRosa, none of them failed.