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Perseverance rides with the sophistication of the iMac G3

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) new probe, Perseverance, uses the most advanced machine ever to land on Mars.

When Perseverance landed on the surface of Mars on February 18, it was carried out with the help of the same processor that supported the 1998 iMac G3 device. It was a desktop computer. all-in-one colorful and round shape that saved Apple’s business and helped it become the company it is today.

According to New Scientists (via Gizmodo), NASA’s newest explorer uses a derivative of the CPU PowerPC 750.The processor is about 23 years old in 2021 or produced in 1998.

By modern standards, the PowerPC 750 doesn’t need to be programmed at home. It is a single core processor with around six million transistors and a clock speed of 233MHz.

Compare that to Apple’s recently announced M1 chipset, which has 16 billion transistors and a maximum clock speed of 3.2GHz, and you’re talking about a very simple CPU on the PowerPC 750. But speed (or lack thereof) is not the reason why NASA is using the PowerPC 750. that.

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NASA has a thing for technology that has proven to be reliable. As one example, in 2006 the agency equipped the New Horizons probe with the Mongoose-V processor, a radiation-suppressed version of the original PlayStation R3000 MIPS CPU.

And when you’re sending a $ 2.4 billion explorer on a one-way trip to the planet that’s 38.6 million miles closest to Earth, you need a CPU, most importantly, one that can be relied on.

And that is what the PowerPC 750 has demonstrated time and time again. The RAD750 variant of the PowerPC 750 that is in the diligence has been hardened to withstand 200,000 to 1,000,000 Rad and temperatures between −55 and 125 degrees Celsius, or -67 and 257 degrees Fahrenheit. The RAD750 currently resides around 100 satellites orbiting around the earth, and all of them are still functioning.

Selection of the PowerPC 750 processor, this may seem ordinary to some people. After all, even with the trouble of buying computer parts these days, surely NASA could find a budget for something like a $ 500 Intel Core i9-10900K CPU (with 10 cores and a max speed of 5.3GHz) somewhere at a cost of 2.7 billion. US dollar. But, as New Scientist explains, such sophisticated chips actually do not fit into the unique operating conditions of Mars.

In large part, this is because the Martian atmosphere provides far less protection from harmful radiation and charged particles than Earth’s atmosphere.

The strong radiation bursts can damage the sensitive electronic devices of modern processors. The more complex the chip, the more errors it can make. In addition, at a distance of 138 million miles, NASA couldn’t simply swap processors if the mission went out of control. Due to these conditions, Perseverance actually has two compute modules: one is a backup just in case something goes wrong.

Technically this is the RAD750 chip, a special variant that is resistant to radiation and costs up to 200,000 US dollars. This chip is also popular with spacecraft: apart from Perseverance and Curiosity, it also supports, among others, the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler telescope.

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Though the processor may be weak compared to those in modern phones or PCs gamingNASA’s specs sheet for Perseverance notes that the processor is much more powerful than previous explorers like Spirit or Opportunity. 200MHz clock speed is 10 times faster than older explorers, and with 2 Giga Byte memory capacity, this processor offers eight times the storage.

Although the chip itself has been on Mars before, Perseverance features some of the planet’s new first-to-launch computer technology – Linux, which powers Ingenuity helicopters that will attempt to fly independently on Mars as part of the Perseverance mission. n SB/theverge/P-4

(SB/P-4)
Editor : Khairil Huda

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