NASA's Orion spacecraft, which launched on its first test flight last week, is at the very forefront of space travel technology. However, it might surprise you to learn that its computers are positively ancient by terrestrial standards. Future crews of Orion missions bound for asteroids, Mars, and beyond will be relying on a single-core processor that first debuted 12 years ago, and it's probably not even as powerful as the one in your smartphone.
If you follow the state of space exploration, that fact might not surprise you at all. The name of the game in space is reliability, not speed. Bleeding edge hardware is great when you're on Earth, but in space astronauts are completely reliant on technology for survival. Components have to be tested again and again, then hardened against every foreseeable circumstance to make for the safest flight possible. That's why Orion's flight computer is a clunky Honeywell console originally developed for use in Boeing airliners. Powering this beast is an IBM PowerPC 750FX, which first hit the market in 2002.
PowerPC chips haven't been of any importance in consumer applications since Apple moved to the x86 architecture starting in 2005. Before that, PowerPC was at the heart of all Apple's machines. In fact, some versions of the iBook G3 from 2003 ran the exact same chip being used in the Orion flight computer. Slightly less powerful versions of the PowerPC 750 were found in the G3-based iMacs of that era too.
The 750FX powering the Orion runs at 900MHz with a bus speed of 166 MHz, and 512KB of on-die L2 cache. It was manufactured with a 0.13 μm process (130 nm). For comparison, we're now down to 14nm process technology in the Core M family of processors. In a direct core-to-core comparison, the 750FX is about as powerful as a the ARM chip used in a Samsung Galaxy SIII.
The computer housing this chip has been completely overhauled for the Orion spacecraft with features like thicker circuit boards, vibration resistant fasteners, and ample radiation shielding. NASA engineers feel confident the system won't be permanently damaged by any radiation it might encounter in deep space, but it might need to reboot. Doing so takes about 20 seconds.
The radiation question has been heavily considered over the course of Orion's design. This craft is intended to take humans farther out in space than ever before, and radiation levels are known to be higher out there. In the event a reboot is required, there's a second flight computer on Orion that can take over. Even that 20 second delay is too long for the craft to be rudderless. Just to make extra sure everything goes as planned on this first test flight, Orion carries a third flight computer as an additional backup. The odds that all three would have overlapping reboots due to radiation is somewhere in the neighborhood of once per 1,870,000 missions.
That's not even the extent of the redundancy built into Orion's computer system. Each flight computer has two PowerPC 750FX chips humming away, but they are not working collaboratively to speed up calculations. Instead, NASA has them both running identical software to error-check each other. If the output of one of these CPUs doesn't match the other (possibly due to radiation exposure), the system will stop and reboot.
This is the state-of-the-art for space travel, but it's woefully underpowered compared to the device you're reading this on. Still, the Orion flight computer will still be ticking away when your phone is taking up space in a landfill.
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Entities 0 Name: Orion Count: 11 1 Name: NASA Count: 3 2 Name: Apple Count: 2 3 Name: Boeing Count: 1 4 Name: DSLR Count: 1 5 Name: Samsung Galaxy SIII Count: 1 6 Name: Honeywell Count: 1 7 Name: Earth Count: 1 8 Name: IBM Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/12RZ2vW Title: What's Next for NASA's Orion Spaceship After Historic 1st Flight? Description: NASA's Orion spacecraft is pulled into the well deck of the U.S. Navy's USS Anchorage after its splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 5. 2014. Orion successfully completed its first-ever test flight that day, an unmanned effort called Exploration Flight Test-1.Credit: NASA NASA's Orion capsule has come back down to Earth after its first-ever test flight, and the spacecraft will remain on terra firma for a while.
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