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NASA Mars Perseverance Rover Uses Same PowerPC Chipset Found in 1998 G3 iMac

This does not surprise me at all as the Hubble Space Telescope is programmed in FORTRAN language, a 66 year old language still used in many of the sciences, even though it's no longer taught to CS majors. Also my PowerPC Macs crashed significantly less than any Intel Mac I've ever had. I think one ran for a solid year without ever being rebooted. Those are the kinds of things that are much more important to NASA than performance. And then, it was designed by IBM at a time when they had world class fabrication.
 
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BaltimoreMediaBlog said:
This does not surprise me at all as the Hubble Space Telescope is programmed in FORTRAN language, a 66 year old language still used in many of the sciences, even though it's no longer taught to CS majors. Also my PowerPC Macs crashed significantly less than any Intel Mac I've ever had. I think one ran for a solid year without ever being rebooted. Those are the kinds of things that are much more important to NASA than performance. And then, it was designed by IBM at a time when they had world class fabrication.
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And on a side note, Novell Netware was WAY more stable than almost any version of Windows server. I had a Netware 3.14 server that ran for three years straight without needing to be rebooted. I had clients that had to reboot their Windows NT servers every day just to keep them from crashing. But anyway...
 
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In addition to what everyone else is saying about reliability and radiation-hardening, the reality is that these rovers and spacecraft don’t actually need incredibly-fast, feature-rich processors to accomplish their mission.

Most of the advanced, whiz bang features of the latest-and-greatest CPUs are dedicated to the user experience - things like complicated graphical user interfaces and processing images and videos. A spacecraft doesn’t have any of that - they are simply a machine executing various tasks uploaded to them by the team on the ground.

Furthermore, the G3 was actually quite a powerful processor. I was in college when the G3 iBook was the latest-and-greatest, and I got one in order to do all of my video editing (I was a film and television major). I had such an advantage over most of my peers who had to go to the computer lab on campus to do their editing.
 
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Jamalien said:
Older processors are more resilient to radiation. Thus they require less shielding, which is heavy. Remember; Mars doesn't have an intrinsic global magnetic field, so incident solar energetic particle radiation is much higher than on Earth
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Radiation hardening is a long process. ECC memory is mandatory, and some probes even use, and used magnetic core memory because it's resilient to radiation. Older is better in some cases. Core memory? Wow...
 
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Dejesus said:
Why so old processor?
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In case the rover encounters any rogue Mars iMacs and needs to speak the same language.

wooow.jpg
 
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glitched79 said:
In addition to what everyone else is saying about reliability and radiation-hardening, the reality is that these rovers and spacecraft don’t actually need incredibly-fast, feature-rich processors to accomplish their mission.

Most of the advanced, whiz bang features of the latest-and-greatest CPUs are dedicated to the user experience - things like complicated graphical user interfaces and processing images and videos. A spacecraft doesn’t have any of that - they are simply a machine executing various tasks uploaded to them by the team on the ground.

Furthermore, the G3 was actually quite a powerful processor. I was in college when the G3 iBook was the latest-and-greatest, and I got one in order to do all of my video editing (I was a film and television major). I had such an advantage over most of my peers who had to go to the computer lab on campus to do their editing.
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Yes, very true. With a round trip of, what, seven minutes for commands, and possibly longer for video? You could run over a rock or crash into a boulder in the time it would take to realize it had happened. Even the experiments wouldn't have to be that quickly analyzed. Speed isn't a virtue in the case of a golf cart you aren't at the wheel of. What's the need for a blower and overhead cams on a golf kart, when 4-wheel drive would be more useful...
 
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krakman said:
23 year old CPU for $200,000...... 🤔
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Which is quite a deal compared to that they used to pay for one.

The Defense Department and NASA used to pay from $50 million to $100 million for each processor in development and manufacturing costs. With AFRL’s involvement, the price of a typical processing module dropped to between $500 thousand and $2 million and is available as off the shelf hardware.
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09872738 said:
Because super-reliability is more important than compute power. The G3 is also used e.g. as mission computer in fighter jets.
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Also I believe the part is available in a radiation resistant version, suitable for beyond low earth orbit.
 
The Apollo missions went to the Moon and back with an onboard computer that had less computing power than a 1970s Texas Instruments pocket calculator. Plus they had a room full of engineers with slide rules. The Voyager missions both launched in 1977 and surely whatever computers they had on board were likely designed in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and both spacecraft are still functioning nearly 44 years later. Perseverance will likely be just fine with a 22 year old chip set that has been tested out more than most chipsets.

I would be more concerned with human error in programming the code than in the chipsets NASA uses. For example, several years ago one Mars mission plowed into the Martian surface at a high rate of speed instantly ending the mission. It was determined that two groups were involved in designing and building the spacecraft and its mission parameters. One used the metric system and the other used the American standard system and somehow forgot to convert some of the calculations into metric. Oops!
 
ArtOfWarfare said:
This is just total nonsense from Old Space.

SpaceX has demonstrated that the correct way isn’t to get crazy expensive parts, but to just build several from commodity parts (at a lower price for all of them than the price of building one from commodity parts) and test them while iterating on the design in rapid succession.

This is how cars were built early on. It’s how the Wright brothers worked. It’s how actual progress gets made.

Starting with 30 year old parts and then taking over a decade to run a test rarely leads to a successful conclusion. See, for example, Boeing Starliner vs SpaceX’s Dragon, or SpaceX’s Starship vs the SLS.
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I mean, I hate to use the whole "rocket scientist" thing....but unless you are a rocket scientist, I kind of think you are just sounding like a "fanboy" or something. Sure SpaceX is doing amazing things, but they are also just doing things one step at a time, and what is right in front of them. Elon himself has said multiple times that a BUNCH of what they have done so far is just to make possible the future development they need to have to make missions to Mars possible. Meaning, there is no need (as others have pointed out) to make anything close to the level of dependability of Perseverance because everything for them currently is localized. Stepping outside of our orbit introduces a WHOLE slew of different issues to worry about, let alone traveling and operating 127M+ miles away. I know 0.05% of what someone would need to know to design a spacecraft, and I am a fairly enthusiastic hobbyist. So take my opinion with a grain of salt, but just know the "wow" of SpaceX doing things, sometimes against the industry norm, is not a direct corollary with what they would have done if they had been building for a Mars mission.

yaxomoxay said:
Oh please, Let’s not pretend that SpaceX is the savior and all-time breaker of records. I love them, don’t get me wrong, and I love the optimization they’re bringing to the aerospace industry, but their missions are relatively simple missions in low orbit. Go up, dock, go down. Stuff that NASA has been doing for what, 50 or 60 years?
We all know that the true problem in the space race is propulsion and ECS, certainly not computing.
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Huh, your comments are strange. No SpaceX is not the savior and all time breaker of records, so I think we agree there. However, this idea that all SpaceX is doing is going up and down is either woefully devoid of context or just plain wrong. Making a reusable rocket system is not something that NASA has been doing EVER let alone for 50 or 60 years. We could get into other innovations, but to keep it simple, your statements either come from a lack of knowledge or an intentional downplaying.

In terms of the "true problem" I guess that depends on perspective. If finances weren't a "true problem" we never would have stopped exploring space to the degree we did once we got to the moon. So SpaceX focusing on how to make money so they can continue to push forward with space development and exploration to me is one of the largest "true problems" that face humanity. Propulsion is mass in/out until someone has a major physics breakthrough, which no one is thinking is going to happen anytime soon (hundreds of years+). So that is not really a "problem" as much as a limitation. Engine design is not a problem, in fact SpaceX and most any other aerospace company has commented on that being the least difficult thing in the rocket designing process. ECS...sure but that only matters if we have the funding to even make that important and even then there is a lot that can be done with what we have before it becomes a limiting factor. Again, just my hobbyist opinion.
 
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