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What's Inside the Mars Rovers

Posted by michael on from the remote-root dept.

Captain Zion writes "Space.com has a story about the hardware and software of Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Basically, they're radiation-shielded, 20MHz PowerPC machines wirh 128Mb RAM and 256Mb of flash memory, running VxWorks. I wonder if I could make a nice firewall with one of these for my home network..."

1 of 458 comments (clear)

  1. driving the rover by QEDog · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    The question that we all want to know is, how do they drive it? I imagine that they have 3 identical car cockpits, with steering wheel, brakes and gas pedal. 3 different engineers drive it, voting on their actions for redundancy. If one of them dies, or goes to the bathroom, or simply starts honking like a mad man, still the other 2 could respond.

    --
    "There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham