When NASA finally launched its Mars 2020 rover last week following several delays, it packed along technology bestowed with all of the good-luck symbolism in the traditional wedding rhyme – something old, something new, something borrowed, and even something blue, if you consider the launch of the powerful Atlas V rocket that propelled the rover through the various shades of the Earth’s atmosphere into deep space.
The old, in this case, is a radiation-hardened version of an IBM PowerPC microprocessor, designed by Motorola and IBM, that is primarily used in satellites and avionics. It basically has the power of a circa 1992 Pentium 1 chip and will be responsible for handling the entire avionics architecture of the rover designed and programmed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “The closer you pack your transistors, the more susceptible to radiation you get,” notes Richard Rieber, a JPL mobility flight systems engineer associated with the project. “With space hardware, you need high reliability, and the RAD750 has had a couple of hundred missions in space.”
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Source: News