Earlier today the Artemis II spacecraft "Integrity" ferried her crew around the moon, making them the official record holders for human distance from earth. What's more, their somewhat roomy (compared to Apollo) spacecraft has a peculiar connection to this board and our hobby: it's powered by a PowerPC G3!
Not a stock G3, of course. NASA didn't go ripping CPUs out of old Power Macs, as funny as the image is. The Artemis computer system is powered by a redundant Honeywell VMS system, each with two redundant Flight Management Computers. These are powered by the PowerPC RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of ol' reliable - the G3.
While this RAD750 isn't the most distant ever flown in itself (that honor goes to the CPU powering the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter) it is the furthest one used in a computer directly interfaced by humans.
So I feel that the only unanswered question of Artemis II at this point is: could you run MacOS 9 on the capsule computer?
Not a stock G3, of course. NASA didn't go ripping CPUs out of old Power Macs, as funny as the image is. The Artemis computer system is powered by a redundant Honeywell VMS system, each with two redundant Flight Management Computers. These are powered by the PowerPC RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of ol' reliable - the G3.
While this RAD750 isn't the most distant ever flown in itself (that honor goes to the CPU powering the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter) it is the furthest one used in a computer directly interfaced by humans.
So I feel that the only unanswered question of Artemis II at this point is: could you run MacOS 9 on the capsule computer?
