NASA’s latest 1998 Mars rover has an iMac-like processor

NASA’s new Perseverance Rover is the most advanced machine that has ever landed on Mars. But when it comes to rovers, “state of the art” is a subjective term. With the exception of the PowerPC 5050, a single course, with a 6 million transistor with a 33 MHz processor, most famous for powering the original “Bondi Blue” iMac since 1998, is being worked on. This is the same type of processor that NASA already uses. Curiosity rover

It feels like garbage to some. After all, despite the difficulty of buying computer parts these days, certain NASA The budget for something like Intel’s $ 500 Core i9-10900 K CPU (maximum clock speed of 10 cores and 5.3GHz) came at a cost of e 2.7 billion. But as New Scientist Explains, such an advanced chip is detrimental to the special operating conditions of Mars.

Image: Apple

This is largely because Mars’ atmosphere offers far less protection from harmful radiation and charged particles than Earth’s atmosphere. A bad explosion of radiation can badly damage the sensitive electronics of a modern processor – and the more complex the chip, the more it can go wrong. Plus, 138 million miles away, it’s not like NASA can turn the processor on if things go sideways. Because of those conditions, diligence actually has two computing modules: one is a backup in case something goes wrong. (A third copy of the module for image analysis is also on board.)

To make the system more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip in Perseverance is a bit different than the old IMAX. It is technically a RAD 750 chip, a special type that is tough against radiation and costs 200,000. The chip is also famous for spacecraft: in addition to diligence and curiosity, it also powers the Fermi space telescope, the lunar reconnaissance bitbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft and the Kepler telescope.

The processor may be weaker than that of a modern smartphone or gaming PC, NASA’s specsheet for perseverance notes that it is more powerful than previous rovers like Soul or Opportunity: its 200mHz clock speeds 10 times faster than those older rovers, and with 2GB Flash memory, it offers storage eight times. (Considering the rounded things, if you are thinking of building your own rover, there is also 256MB of RAM in the console.)

But while the chip itself was previously on Mars, Perseverance has some new computer technology that is unveiling for the first time on the planet: Linux, which powers the ingenuity helicopter that will attempt to fly spontaneously to Mars as part of the congregation’s mission.