NASA’s latest Mars Rover has had the same processor as the iMac since 1998

NASA’s brand-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. The Fixture is running on none other than the Powerpack 750, a single-core, 233 MHz processor with only 6 million transistors that is best known for powering the original “Bondy Blue” iMac since 1998. This is the same type of processor that NASA already uses. Curiosity Rover.

This may seem like a waste to some. After all, with the difficulty of buying computer parts these days, of course NASA Could have got a budget for something like Intel’s $ 500 Core i9-10900K CPU (with 10 cores and maximum clock speed of 5.3GHz) at a firm cost of $ 2.7 billion. but As New scientist telling, Such an advanced chip is actually a hindrance to the unique operating conditions of Mars.

The main reason for this is that the atmosphere of Mars provides much less protection from harmful radiation and charged particles than the Earth’s atmosphere. A bad burst of radiation can wipe out the sensitive electronics of modern processors – and the more complex the chip, the more inaccurate it can be. Also, at 138 million miles, it’s not that NASA can just swap out processors if things go sideways. Because of those situations, persistence actually introduces two computing modules: simply a backup if something goes wrong. (The third copy of the module is also on the board for image analysis.)

To make the system more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip in Perseverance differs slightly from the one in older iMacs. It is technically A RAD750 chip, A special type that hardens against radiation and costs upwards of $ 200,000. The chip is also popular for spacecraft: in addition to perseverance and curiosity, it also empowers the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact Comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler Telescope, among others.

While the processor may be weaker than a modern smartphone or gaming PC, Nasa’s device Note for persistence that it is far more powerful than earlier Rovers like the Soul or Opportunity: its 200MHz clock speed is 10 times faster than those older Rovers, and with 2GB of flash memory, it provides eight times the storage Does. (Rounding things out, there’s also a solid 256MB of RAM when you wanted to build your rover.)