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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..."

99 of 458 comments (clear)

  1. What's the bus speed on that thing? by }InFuZeD{ · · Score: 3, Funny

    Does a 20mhz processor really need 128mb of ram? I mean, with a bus speed that low, you can probably put the data to flash ROM just as fast. What are the chances of you using all 128mb of ram?

    1. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by gerf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Does a 20mhz processor really need 128mb of ram? I mean, with a bus speed that low, you can probably put the data to flash ROM just as fast. What are the chances of you using all 128mb of ram?

      I imagine they can use all the storage they can, since there's no hard drive. So, the RAM acts as a cache for everything that is transmitted (which is a lot, actually). The Flash is used for more permanant software, like OS, commands, other files, ect. I'm amazed they can do it all with as little as they have.

    2. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by 4r0g · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The memory is probably partitioned, and some banks can be shut down if they fail. Thus the 128MB. OR, you could use it as texture memory (wonder what the display adapter is like ;)

      --
      - 4r0g
    3. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by CaptainAlbert · · Score: 4, Informative

      > Does a 20mhz processor really need 128mb of ram?

      A processor of any speed doesn't need RAM of any size.

      The application you want to run needs both processing power and memory. How much of each? Depends on the application.

      --
      These sigs are more interesting tha
    4. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by GoofyBoy · · Score: 5, Funny

      >What are the chances of you using all 128mb of ram?

      Ask Bill Gates.

      --
      The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
    5. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by adrianbaugh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Completely off-topic, but you reminded me of something: given that most modern CPUs have a meg or so of cache built into the chip, would it be possible to build a machine with no plug-in memory modules and have it boot something simple like DOS? Or would the motherboard complain that you were being silly?

      --
      "'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
      - JRR Tolkien.
    6. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Writing to flash takes a long time. The difference between RAM and flash will be very noticable, even for a 20MHz processor. For example, a write to the Fujitsu "high-speed" flash devices takes 12.6uS (per 16-bit word), according to Fujitsu's specs. For a 20 MIPs processor, 1 instruction is 50 nS, so modern RAM can "keep up" with it. In this situation, writing to flash would be more than 250 times slower than RAM, even with very fast flash.

      Disclaimer: Even faster flash devices may exist, but I don't know about them.

    7. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by jandrese · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Generally, no. The cache maintains a _copy_ of recently accessed main memory. Logically it is not a seperate memory space, rather it shows up as certain memory locations being faster than others when you access them. The upshot is that you still need at least as much main memory as cache space to actually use the chace.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    8. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by brain159 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Flash "disk" controllers take care of wear-levelling automatically; even though you're writing to the same logical block number on the disk, it's actually not the same spot in the flash every time.

    9. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by 3waygeek · · Score: 5, Funny

      In other words, the Spirit is willing, but the flash is weak.

    10. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by iamdrscience · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Using Flash ROM as RAM is a baaaaaad idea. There actually is a limit to how many times it can be rewritten, you'd just never get to it with any normal use of Flash (i.e. as storage space), but it's definitely within reach when you use it as RAM (or as swap space). In fact, you'll wear it out pretty quickly (depends on the system design and activity and such, but I would guess maybe a few weeks for this one).

    11. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by deadlinegrunt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "I'm amazed they can do it all with as little as they have."

      All the more reason you can't help but laugh when people bring up arguments like "with computers/RAM/storage becoming so cheap and abundant who cares if {insert some bloated, interpreted, garbage collected language here} - just update your hardware."

      One size fits all never does...

      --
      BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
    12. Re:What's the bus speed on that thing? by addaon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      However, many processors (the G3/750FX comes to mind) allow you to address cache as physical memory, allowing exactly what the grandparent mentioned. You'll still need an external memory controller, though, to get stuff from ROM for boot purposes.

      --

      I've had this sig for three days.
  2. Radiation hardness by swordboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does anyone know what the deal was with the flash memory that caused the outage? I heard something about a "solar event" that caused a problem with the flash memory that led to the outage. It was subsequently resolved by disabling the flash. If so, BAE Aerospace has a possible solution with their upcoming line of rad-hard memory.

    --

    Life is the leading cause of death in America.
    1. Re:Radiation hardness by TwistedGreen · · Score: 5, Interesting
      It appears to be a software error, and not hardware-related. It actually looks like it ran out of swap space and the OS crashed. This article explains what they think happened, and this article has more information on their recovery plans.

      A quote:
      It is now believed that the rover's flash memory had become so full of files that the craft couldn't manage all of the information stored aboard. Spirit bogged down because it didn't have enough random access memory, or RAM, to handle the current amount of files in the flash -- including data recorded during its cruise from Earth to Mars and the 18 days of operations on the red planet's surface.
      Raises some interesting questions about software reliability, I think. Did nobody think about running out of disk space?
    2. Re:Radiation hardness by parc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They didn't run out of "disk space". They ran out of RAM. My guess is that when reading the "directory" structure of the flash, a data structure needed to be allocated in RAM. When the malloc for that structure failed, it counted as a hard failure and the system rebooted. Presumably, a malloc failing is a symptom of much larger problems in your system, problems that you won't be able to overcome, so the best thing is to wipe everything and start fresh.

    3. Re:Radiation hardness by The_K4 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As side effect this means that Opertunity probably has the SAME bug! :(

    4. Re:Radiation hardness by cdrudge · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Which is why as soon as they were communicating with it they started deleting files immediately.

    5. Re:Radiation hardness by barawn · · Score: 3, Informative

      I would have thought that the memory would be swapped out

      Swapped out? To where? You're being a bit recursive here. The operation failing is the initialization and reading of the flash. You can't swap to flash while you're initializing it.

      However, I doubt they implemented virtual memory on the thing. It's far too much overhead in the OS to actually implement paging, etc. They were probably just very, very careful about the amount of memory in use at any one time, as with most embedded systems. Someone, however, didn't check that in a massively fragmented flash filesystem, the directory read wouldn't take up the entire RAM. Oops.

    6. Re:Radiation hardness by AaronW · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If anyone saw my earlier posts on VxWorks they would see I am not at all surprised about the problems NASA is having.

      As someone with first-hand experience with VxWorks let me say that VxWorks' memory handling code sucks. Their malloc implementation has got to be the worst one ever designed. It fragments horribly and when fragmented has unusable performance. A malloc call can take many milliseconds when memory gets fragmented. Our box used to crash due to the fragmentation. I replaced Wind River's code with DLMalloc and that fixed the memory issue. We went from many tens of thousands of fragments to only a few dozen. Our reliability significantly increased as well after dumping Wind Rivers brain-dead malloc code. BTW, glibc uses a variant of Doug Lea's malloc code, so it's been widely tested.

      Furthermore, in VxWorks there is no way to identify what process malloced a block of memory. There is no memory protection either (think DOS). If a task has a memory leak, VxWorks does not provide any method of tracking down the culprit. I had to add that support to the DL Malloc code I ported so we could find memory leaks and general memory usage by task.

      Since malloc is critical to the working of VxWorks, if you run out of memory you are basically completely dead. Often the only way to recover is to wait for the hardware watchdog timer to kick in and reboot the system.

      If a task dies in VxWorks with a bad pointer there is no way to recover other than reboot. The OS will not clean up after a task (i.e. free memory, close files, release semaphores).

      As far as flash goes, VxWorks supports the FAT16 file system. As you know, FAT16 sucks. It only supports a limited number of files in the root directory. It's relatively easy to corrupt, and when corrupt it tends to corrupt itself even worse. There is no wear leveling support. If the FAT table or root directory gets corrupted, you're screwed. VxWorks is even worse since there arn't tools to fix a corrupt file system.

      VxWorks is not a scalable OS. The OS gets slower as the number of tasks increases. Realtime support sucks. Although it has support for things like priority inheritance to prevent priority inversion, the best guaranteed realtime latency is half the system tick rate (the tick rate is usually 10ms).

      Also remember that unlike open source operating systems, the source code to VxWorks is not available unless you pay some major $$$. Without the source you're basically working blind.

      VxWorks is an old RTOS, and its age is definitely showing. It is not a robust OS.

      As far as turning VxWorks into a firewall, you'll need to write all your own code. The VxWorks TCP/IP stack is an archaic vulnerable version of the BSD stack. TCP sequence number guessing is trivial. There is no built-in support for firewall support, NAT, or anything else. I have heard many many complaints about the VxWorks networking code. Although the box I'm working on is a router and broadband remote access server, we don't use the VxWorks TCP/Ip stack much. I am sure the VxWorks stack is vulnerable to many of the current DOS attacks as well.

      Some of you might say why not use VxWorks AE, which adds memory protection. Think hacked-in memory protection far worse than Windows 95. It's slow, very buggy, and poorly supported. We tried AE and after many months we dumped it and went back to the non-AE version. Very few companies actually went with AE.

      Today there are many other choices for an RTOS that are better than VxWorks. For our next major project we're looking at both QNX and TimeSys Linux. QNX is a true microkernel design with the core being around 70K. Every driver is protected and can be restarted if it crashes. I think you can even buy a medical grade version of QNX. TimeSys Linux is also pretty cool, with excellent real-time support and all the advantages of Linux. For something like the Mars rover, QNX would be better due to the limited amount of memory and greater robustness.

      Wi

      --
      This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
    7. Re:Radiation hardness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm not defending VxWorks, but my preference for real-time design is to NOT use dynamic memory allocation (malloc) or dynamic anything else except during startup. If I need to protect a region of memory, I'll setup the MMU myself (statically with no page swapping) since their basic MMU package is not very robust.

      BTW: VxWorks 5.5 does support FAT32.

      --Robert

    8. Re:Radiation hardness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Your comments about VxWorks show me that you don't have a well establish practical Real Time OS (RTOS)experience and are trying to to compare an RTOS to a Server or Desktop OS. That is quite a bit misleading. For example,
      consider the use of malloc()/free(). In an RTOS it does not much sense to dynamically allocate and free memory at run time. Same thing applied to other sytem resources, like tasks/processes. This takes quite a bit of time from a Real Time point of view to create new tasks, semaphores, objects, memory allocation, etc.. Most RTOS engineers, who know what they are doing, pre-allocate all the memory they need at boot time, start all the processes they will need, etc. In order words you allocate all your system resources at boot time so you keep your real time characteristics. An RTOS system is static. no dynamically process allocation, memory allocation (i.e. unexpectantly running out of memory), etc. You start everything up and account for your needs. A very different model from probably what you are used to in a Desktop/Server OS. Think about it as static appliance. Give me one good reason why you can't preallocate memory and all the tasks you will need?

      Yes memory protection has its benefits. Speed is not one of them. Remember this is an RTOS. How many RTOS do you know of that support memory protection? hmm.. 1 I believe. Which is VxWorks AE. Which you say is slow. gee. If you want a low latency fast RTOS, memory protection quickly falls off your "must have" list.

      So VxWorks supports FAT16. So that makes it suck?
      It also supports FAT32, NFS, a Flash Filesystem, etc. So all those points make it such too. I see your reasoning. ;-P

      VxWorks, every other true RTOS, does not use the system clock exclusively to multitask a you say. In fact, round robin multitasking which uses the system clock is turned off by default Unlike a server/desktop OS, a context switch is not generated strictly via an interrupt (system clock, device interrupts). context switches can occur at any time as your code generates events. For example, giving a semaphore to unblock a test, sending message to a message queue which unblocks a waiting receiver, trying to get hold of an object which is in use (this would block you). This does not require a high latency and it almost immediate. This is because all code runs in processor supervisor mode. i.e. no traps to communicate from one task to another. This goes along with the no memory protections reasoning. It has benefits. Let me guess you didn't read the manual or take a vxWorks 101 class, right?

      Nasa has been using vxWorks primarly on most of their projects since 1980! I think that says alot by itself. Thank you for your "expert" opinion in helping people judge the quality of an RTOS.

    9. Re:Radiation hardness by tezzer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why the hell would you be doing dynamic memory allocation in an RTOS? Bad coder. Bad, Bad, Bad.

      --
      (Celui que tient la peur de devinir nuage)
    10. Re:Radiation hardness by AaronW · · Score: 4, Informative
      While I would agree with you that avoiding malloc and preallocating memory is the way to go, but it is not always possible. In my case, we are using various 3rd party libraries, and changing them to use static memory allocation would be prohibitave. In at least one case, the third party library source code was not available. Also, in many cases the dynamic nature of some algorithms requires dynamic memory management. You cannot statically allocate everything, especially in a limited memory environment.

      I know we're not the only ones to have been burned by Wind River's malloc. I know several major companies that also had to replace Wind River's code.

      As far as being able to dynamically replace code, VxWorks isn't alone in that. Numerous other RTOSes out there can do the same thing, including QNX. QNX even supports the concept of a hot standby process to take over if the main process dies.

      To give you an idea about how Wind River's malloc works, they keep a sorted linked list of fragments from the smallest to the largest. When you try and allocate a block, it walks the linked list until it finds a block large enough. Likewise, when you free a block it checks if it can coalesc the block with a neighboring block. It then goes through the linked list looking for a slot to insert the free block.

      Yes, VxWorks may have been around since the 80's, but that's part of the problem too and it is showing its age. In the 80s embedded processors typically did not have MMUs. Now MMUs are quite common in the more powerful embedded processors.

      You say you can't have low latency and memory protection? QNX proves that you can. It is low latency and *very* robust. If your driver dies, no problem, restart it. Timesys Linux also has a very low latency, although not as low as QNX. Timesys also has an interesting feature where you can guarantee CPU and networking resources. I can schedule a task to be guaranteed 5.8ms of execution every 8.3ms and it will guarantee that that task will get the CPU time allotted to it with the desired resolution. This is without increasing the system tick rate (usually 10ms). Timesys can also schedule a task to be higher priority than an interrupt. I'm not as familiar with QNXs scheduler, but it's also quite flexible from what I've heard.

      As far as FAT, it is not a robust filesystem. It never has been. If the FAT gets corrupted or a directory entry gets corrupted it's difficult to recover. Other than possibly having 2 copies of the FAT cluster table, any corruption can be difficult to repair. If the FAT table gets corrupted, which table is corrupt and which is not? If a directory entry gets corrupted, it can be impossible to fix. For flash memory, unless you are using a device with special wear-leveling, FAT is about the worst choice since any file write that changes the size of a file requires a write to the directory entry and possibly the FAT table. If the table gets corrupted and you don't run a repair operation (which often ends up leaving orphaned files as lost clusters), the file system can happily corrupt itself to death. Why do you think every time DOS/Windows9x/ME crashed it had to repair the disk with scandisk? FAT is a poorly designed file system that was originally designed for 160K floppies and scales poorly. FAT32 is an improvement, but it's still not very robust. For flash, something like Linux's journalling flash file system 2 (JFFS2). More information on VxWorks file system support can be found here.

      Basic VxWorks information can be found http://www.slac.stanford.edu/exp/glast/flight/docs /VxWorks_2.2/vxworks/guide/.

      --
      This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
    11. Re:Radiation hardness by Cap'n+Canuck · · Score: 2, Insightful

      As great as QNX is compared to VxWorks, it
      A) Would never have been chosen as the OS of choice

      B) Will never BE chosen to replace VxWorks

      Why? It's a great company, but it's based in Ottawa (that's Canada for you Yankees), and NA$A Bucks do not flow over the border.

    12. Re:Radiation hardness by AaronW · · Score: 2, Informative

      Take a look at QNX. I'm not very familiar with many other RTOSes. RTEMS is another interesting one I looked at (is open source). If you do decide to go with VxWorks, make sure you get the source code. A word of warning, though, VxWorks TCP/IP support isn't all that great and performance is mediocre. It's based on an ancient BSD stack.

      QNX has a lot of reliability features built in that are not present in VxWorks, Linux, or RTEMS. It can take periodic snapshots of a task and recover if a task dies.

      Also, field debugging of VxWorks can be a real pain. It does not generate a core file you can debug later.

      Timesys has very good real time support, but the context switching time is on the order of 10us depending on the processor, QNX is better.

      QNX is more more like a unix environment with real threads and processes. QNX relies mostly on effecient message passing between tasks. QNX also has much better TCP/IP support than VxWorks, including support for IPv6. From what I can tell, development and debugging in QNX is much easier than VxWorks. QNX does not have as many priority levels as VxWorks. QNX Neutrino supports 64 priorities. VxWorks supports 256. Timesys Linux can support thousands of priorities.

      QNX also has built-in support for distributed processing as long as there is an interconnect. It also supports SMP (VxWorks does not).

      VxWorks, on the other hand, is like a single task with many threads. A "task" in VxWorks is more like a thread in that all memory is globally accessable. Any function can call any other function.

      I havn't worked with QNX or Timesys personally. I've spent the last 4 years developing for VxWorks Tornado II. The group where I work dealing with OS related issues has more or less decided to use either QNX or Timesys for our next generation software. Timesys looks good from the tools perspective and the wide Linux experience out there, plus the fact that currently our product runs on a mixture of Unix and VxWorks, plus many of the drivers we need are available for Linux and would need to be ported to QNX. Some of the key software we are using has been ported to QNX, though, and the reliability of QNX is also of interest. QNX has also won some nice design wins like Cisco. Since we make routing equipment we tend to pay attention to things like that.

      Also, beware that Wind River's support isn't very good from our experience. It basically boils down to "what support?" even with a support contract. Wind River has layed off a lot of people lately and I'm sure that hasn't helped the company. They've been bleeding money like crazy and are hurting pretty bad. They've been losing market share to other embedded RTOSes and Linux. Hell, Wind River has ported their development tools to support embedded Linux (I wonder why?).

      As far as real-time Linux is concerned, I looked at several of them. RT-Linux requires that RT tasks talk to the RT kernel and use a separate API and drivers than the Linux tasks. It's basically Linux running on top of a RT kernel. Monta Vista does not provide hard real-time, and when I last spoke with them they had no solution for priority inversion. Timesys modified the stock Linux kernel so RT tasks don't need to use a separate set of APIs from non-RT tasks and Timesys can guarantee timing, both for the CPU and networking. For soft real-time, Monta Vista seems to be pretty popular. The people I spoke with who used it said it was quite reliable but couldn't comment on support since they never needed any.

      -Aaron

      --
      This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
  3. What's inside the rover? by Chilltowner · · Score: 5, Funny

    Darn. Interesting articles, but I was hoping that inside it was filled with creamy nougat center. Oh, wait. I'm thinking Mars bar. Nevermind.

  4. Wait a second... by deitel99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The machines aren't as slow as the top post says... they don't run at 20MHz, they are "capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second". Depending on the complexity of the instructions, the processor actually runs several times faster than 20MHz.

    1. Re:Wait a second... by danheskett · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's an excellent point. A lot of people are thinking instruction = 1 cycle. The real world is that it's not unusual for an instruction to take 2, 4, 10, or even 100 cycles. The reality of the matter is that instructions can be anything from a single two bit sum to a floating point division. I see this mistake a lot... bravo for applying what you read against the supposition of a simplification.

    2. Re:Wait a second... by Zog+The+Undeniable · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Actually, they're probably slower :-P

      Modern superscalar (pipelined) processors have a lot more MIPS than megahertz.

      --
      When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
    3. Re:Wait a second... by Rootbear · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually they are running at 20MHz. I've seen several write ups which clearly state that. The RAD6000 can apparently run at up to 33MHz, with a claimed 35MIPS. The rovers are "underclocked", probably due to power budget concerns.

      Go to
      http://www.iews.na.baesystems.com/space/rad600 0/ra d6000.html
      and click on the rover picture to get a PDF brochure, which gives the 33MHz/35MIPS figure.

      Rootbear

    4. Re:Wait a second... by Have+Blue · · Score: 2, Informative

      Superscalar refers to multiple execution units, not pipelining.

    5. Re:Wait a second... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Don't you mean you need to benchmark in out of this world applications.

    6. Re:Wait a second... by Thuktun · · Score: 2, Informative

      deitel99: The machines aren't as slow as the top post says... they don't run at 20MHz, they are "capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second". Depending on the complexity of the instructions, the processor actually runs several times faster than 20MHz.

      danheskett: That's an excellent point. A lot of people are thinking instruction = 1 cycle. The real world is that it's not unusual for an instruction to take 2, 4, 10, or even 100 cycles. The reality of the matter is that instructions can be anything from a single two bit sum to a floating point division. I see this mistake a lot...

      You both assume that the one who wrote the article didn't make the same mistake in the opposite direction.

      In this article about the Stardust probe, the RAD6000 is said to be "a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip used on some models of Macintosh computers" which "can be switched between clock speeds of 5, 10 or 20 MHz".

  5. Self-warming by Faust7 · · Score: 5, Funny

    To survive the frigid Martian night, MER computers are housed in warm electronics boxed heated by a combination of electric heaters, eight radioisotope heater units as well as the natural warmth from the electronics themselves.

    Just leave off the heatsinks and fans, and everything should be fine.

    --
    The coolest voice ever.
    1. Re:Self-warming by Cyclopedian · · Score: 5, Interesting
      To survive the frigid Martian night, MER computers are housed in warm electronics boxed heated by a combination of electric heaters, eight radioisotope heater units as well as the natural warmth from the electronics themselves.[Emphasis added by me]

      If obsessed environmentalists don't like NASA sending up probes with any radioactive material ('it might blow up, ohh..'), then how did this little tidbit get by them? Do they consider it non-radioactive? If they're only concerned by radioactive propulsion systems, then I think they're a bunch of hypocrites. Radioactivitiy is radioactivity whether it's propulsion or heating.

      If they don't mind it, then let's send up those dune buggies with RTG and 18-inch wheels and cover a lot more of Mars.

      -Cyc

      --
      /.'s 10 Millionth
    2. Re:Self-warming by Zog+The+Undeniable · · Score: 5, Funny

      If only they'd used an Athlon, the planet would have been habitable in Bermuda shorts by the end of the week.

      --
      When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
    3. Re:Self-warming by JDevers · · Score: 4, Informative

      If I'm not mistaken, virtually all probes have some sort of radioisotope heater...

      Radioactivity is NOT radioactivity when you are considering things like this. Saying the people who don't want nuclear powered rockets should hate this as well or else they are hypocrites is tantamount to saying that the people who don't like oil spills should bitch about how some motor oil ALWAYS stays in the plastic container it is shipped in. Not quite the same problem. Afterall, these things aren't much more radioactive than a Coleman lantern wick or a smoke detector element...

    4. Re:Self-warming by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2, Insightful
      If they don't mind it, then let's send up those dune buggies with RTG and 18-inch wheels and cover a lot more of Mars.

      I don't know, but I'd guess that for rovers of this size and weight, it might be easier to use solar panels than to figure out how to dump all of the waste heat that an RTG would produce. These devices are highly inefficient in terms of converting thermal energy to electrical energy, so they are probably spewing kilowatts of thermal energy at all times, and there's no way to shut them off.

      That would pose two immediate problems: with the el-cheapo balloon-based reentry system used, how do you keep the rover from frying when it's wrapped up in its airbag cocoon? The only way would seem to be a heat sink, but that would add significant weight to the spacecraft.

      The second problem would be how to radiate all of that heat during operation. The outer planet probes have spindly rods that hold the RTG a few meters away from the main body. A rover couldn't do this and maintain balance, so you would need some kind of closely attached radiator with liquid cooling and/or heat shielding to protect the main unit from the intense heat. Once again, this could end up being heavier than simple solar panels.

    5. Re:Self-warming by The+Fun+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Radioisotope thermoelectric power units need to be hot enough to allow for electricity to be generated by thermocouples placed between the unit and the heat sink (space). A quick Google search gives 200-500 watts of power generated from multiple interleaved stacks of plutonium-238 or strontium-90, average radioactive source strength of around 50,000 curies, depending on design.

      Radioisotope heaters use much less material, as they only need enough heat to keep the warm electronics box above -40F or so. From the Environmental Impact Statement in the Federal Register ([wais.access.gpo.gov][DOCID:fr10de02-54]):

      "Each rover would employ two [calibration] instruments that use small quantities of cobalt-57 (not exceeding 350 millicuries) and curium-244 (not exceeding 50 millicuries) as instrument sources. Each rover would have up to 11 RHUs that use plutonium dioxide to provide heat to the electronics and batteries on board the rover. The radioisotope inventory of 11 RHUs would total approximately 365 curies of plutonium."

      Nothing you'd like to swallow, but still, much smaller than a radioisotope power unit.

      --
      The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
    6. Re:Self-warming by A55M0NKEY · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Someone said a while back that a house made of aerogel would need only a candle to heat it. Surely surrounding the electronics in and Aerogel box would trap so much heat they would melt themselves. I understand that they have to shut the electronics off at night, so the radioisotope heaters make sence, but why all the other heaters?

      --

      Eat at Joe's.

    7. Re:Self-warming by A55M0NKEY · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's not putting out Uranuim, Thorium, Plutonium or other heavy elements. Those are produced in supernovae, and can tell a story that would be erased by a nuclear rocket.

      --

      Eat at Joe's.

  6. If you've got money to burn, sure by Powercntrl · · Score: 4, Funny

    But I'd take a Linksys over a hacked Mars Rover anyday... Billions cheaper, ya know.

    --

    ---
    DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
  7. Radiation Shielding by kyknos.org · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How is it done? Some external armor, or even insides of the chip are different?

    ---

    --

    SHE does throw dice.
    1. Re:Radiation Shielding by pi+eater · · Score: 5, Funny

      A modded alienware case perhaps?

      geeky stuff.. offensive stuff!

    2. Re:Radiation Shielding by the+real+darkskye · · Score: 5, Informative

      The CPU is fabricated to withstand the radiation, a brief summary can be found here or by googling

      --
      Music is everybody's possession.
      It's only publishers who think that people own it.
      Fuck Beta
      ~John Lenno
    3. Re:Radiation Shielding by PhuCknuT · · Score: 2, Informative

      Both.

      They have extra shielding on the outside, and the electronics on the inside are designed to disipate sudden charges created by radiation hits.

    4. Re:Radiation Shielding by shawnce · · Score: 2, Informative

      A lot is done with extra shielding but often radiation hardened chips use larger feature sizes then modern equivalents. The larger the features the more resilient they can be to particle/energy hits. Basically they are harder to damage permanently.

  8. Redundency Check? by shlomo · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I read somewhere that the shuttle spacecraft, has 6 computers for redundancy checks.

    Your Average plane have a triple backup system, I spoke to some engineer and he said preflight checks are usally just making sure two of the systems are still working

    you'd think they could at least send up some more hardware with these little critters. The extra weight would pan out, when things go bad...case in point see what they are dealing with now :)

    --
    sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
    1. Re:Redundency Check? by snake_dad · · Score: 3, Insightful
      That way of thinking would make the cost of robotic space exploration approach that of human space exploration. Plus, the rover will not crash with loss of life in case of a minor computer failure. There is a much bigger margin for troubleshooting "in the field" than with aircraft or manned spacecraft.

      Ofcourse NASA did implement a measure of redundancy by sending two rovers instead of just one.

      --
      karma capped .sig seeking available Slashdot poster for long-term relationship.
    2. Re:Redundency Check? by vofka · · Score: 5, Informative

      If I recall correctly, the Shuttle has 5 GPC's (General Purpose Computers), three of which are "online" at any one time.

      The online GPC's each carry out the same set of calculations (potentially each uses code designed to do the same thing, but written by different programmers), and they compare each others results. If any single GPC is considered to be too far wrong, the offline GPC's submit their answers. The three GPC's that are in closest agreement then become the new online GPC's, and the remaining two go offline. The GPC's can reboot themselves if they are too far out of whack, if they fail in one of the "results elections", and of course when they are told to do so by the crew.

      Also, whenever a GPC is sent offline by one of the others, a specific caution indicator (and potentially the master caution indicator and klaxon) is activated, and the relevant error codes are shown on one of the forward CRT's. The error codes, along with other information such as the currently running program and the current mission phase, determine the crew's actions. Actions can be as simple as disabling the master caution klaxon for the current alert, all the way to hand-checking certain results and manual GPC restarts.

      This is all from memory (from about 5 years back), so some of this may have changed recently, particularly on Atlantis with the "glass cockpit" upgrade that happened 18 months or so ago, but the general gist should be about right (and I'm sure I'll soon know if it isn't!!)

      --
      Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
  9. A nice Firewall? by blorg · · Score: 5, Funny

    "I wonder if I could make a nice firewall with one of these for my home network..."

    You could, but the latency would be a bitch.

  10. Units, units, units!!! by Cutriss · · Score: 3, Informative

    Basically, they're radiation-shielded, 20MHz PowerPC machines wirh 128Mb RAM and 256Mb of flash memory, running VxWorks.

    Mb = Megabits
    MB = Megabytes.

    The article writes out megabytes, so MB should be used, not Mb!

    --
    "Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
  11. Should it have some redundancy? by mikesmind · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "It's quite unusual to have a single computer for the whole mission," Scuderi said, adding that many missions tend to have redundant systems as a guard against failure.
    Now, while having two rovers is a form of redundancy, wouldn't it be wise to have some redundancy on each individual rover? I understand that there are concerns like weight and budget, but wouldn't some redundancy be a good form or risk management?

    --
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  12. Ouch by savagedome · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In addition to VxWorks' reliability, the system allows users to add software patches -- such as a glitch fix or upgrade -- without interruption while a mission is in flight. "We've always had that [feature] so you don't have to shut down, reload and restart after every patch," Blackman said, adding that some commercial desktop systems require users to reboot their computers after a patch

    The bold emphasis is mine but that is a big Ouch for Microsoft.


    RAD6000 microprocessors are radiation-hardened versions of the PowerPC chips that powered Macintosh computers in the early 1990s
    Shouldn't Apple be using this in their commercials somehow to further boost their reliability. I am sure the PR market can put it in a way that non-geeks watching tv can relate, right?

    --


    Free XBox, PS2
    1. Re:Ouch by Quasar1999 · · Score: 3, Informative

      AH dude... Microsoft is totally different... VxWorks is based on the fact that all memory is linearly accessable.. there is no memory protection... that works great when all your apps are written in-house, and you know the timer ain't gonna trash the motor controller...

      But try that on an OS for a desktop system, and your email program just may blow up your paint program... (remember Windows 3.1's stability? Make that 10x worse)... You can't use VxWorks for the desktop as Windows is used today... it needs a lot of protection... The ease of upgrading is due to the lack of protection...

      --

      ---
      Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
  13. Flying VxWorks to Mars by Hiroto.+S · · Score: 5, Informative
    I googled across following presentation with a little more details.

    Flying VxWorks to Mars

  14. Re:I hope the flash memory was not commodity hardw by Rootbear · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is very little on the Rovers that is "commodity" in any sense. The CCD image sensors, the computers, everything, is all custom made. Everything has to be made to withstand the rigors of flight and the harsh environments of space and Mars. The CPU does not have a backup, which is a bit unusual for NASA (I'm a contractor at NASA/Goddard, but not involved in any flight missions). However, the particular computer used on the rovers (the RAD6000) has a very good record. There are something like 150 in use on various spacecraft and they've all worked very well.

    And the flash memory has probably not failed. It seems to have been a software problem, not hardware.

    Rootbear

  15. Internet conneciton by vpscolo · · Score: 4, Funny

    And it can still send back at 128 kbits/sec which is faster than my connection can managed. Just waiting for it to start getting spam advertising pr0n and viagra.

    Spirit Rover: Staying up longer and harder

    Rus

    --
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  16. memory overflow caused Spirit shutdown? by peter303 · · Score: 2, Informative

    A leading hypothesis is that flash memory overflow caused Spirit to be shut down for two weeks. Either it was a failure in the memory chips or OS software garbage collection. They are purging and patching now. A few days of testing and perhaps Spirit is active again.

    The lockup happend just as they were going to drill into the rock they've been sitting in front of for nine days. Perhaps there was drill issue too. When the rover memory crashed, it tried to reboot its computer at least a hundred times.

    1. Re:memory overflow caused Spirit shutdown? by britt · · Score: 2, Informative

      It wasn't an overflow. They ran out of inodes. They had lots of space, but no more inodes, which is why deleting files should fix things up.

      The first intergalactice filesystem bug

      --
      --Britt
    2. Re:memory overflow caused Spirit shutdown? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      A leading hypothesis is that flash memory overflow caused Spirit to be shut down for two weeks.

      Yeah - everything was going fine until the rover contacted Microsoft for its weekly update and choked on all the security patches.

    3. Re:memory overflow caused Spirit shutdown? by LordNimon · · Score: 2, Informative

      It can't be intergalactic if it's in the same solar system. It could be intragalactic, but a better word is interplanetary.

      --
      And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
      To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
  17. Not 20Mhz by kuyttendaele · · Score: 2, Informative

    But 20 MIPS

  18. Re:But The Question is.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    you seem to assume that real time OS are faster than non real time Oses, that's usually not the case. the difference between the two is that a RTOS has a guarenteed response time, not a faster one...

    it is not uncommon on so hard real time system to disable processor cache, it makes the processor slower, but the response time to an interrupt is easier to calculate. In RTOS interrupt latency must be PROVEN not to be longer than a constraint.

  19. Something strange... by J.+Charles+Holt · · Score: 2, Funny

    I noticed something odd in the latest shots from the Rover. Just on the horizon:

    http://idisk.mac.com/charlesholt/public/DuckDodg er s.jpg

  20. Beagle-2 by TheSurfer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    An interview with one of the Beagle-2 software developers can be found here: http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7460495111.html

  21. Save HST! Sell Sojourner knock-offs by bhima · · Score: 4, Interesting
    What NASA should do is to hire a Taiwanese firm to build inexpensive knock-offs of Sojourner. They already have the design, I'm sure a few bright minds could cut the chassis price down significantly; after all we don't need all the exotic materials. I'm sure IBM still makes a PPC variant that would make a new cheap board layout easy. As far as the OS: of course we don't need VxWorks (Nor could the project afford it) we have NetBSD!

    The profits from Slashdot alone could extend the life of HST or launch the James Web Space Telescope early.

    I thought about the current rovers, but I think they are a bit large to be successful!

    --
    Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
    1. Re:Save HST! Sell Sojourner knock-offs by CXI · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For a second, like the other reply, I thought you were talking about making a fleet of knock-offs to send to Mars. However, an RC car style robot kit would be pretty cool. I did see that NASA is releasing a lego kit of the current rovers. I would think a reduced scale MER would also be nice to have, especially if you could get a basic big track level unit cheap and upgrade it with cameras, sensors, wireless and a navigation system as add-ons.

  22. Mac users.. by JayPee · · Score: 3, Funny

    You know what's annoying about this story now that it's making the roungs.

    Mac users everywhere take this as "Oooohh.. there's a Mac inside of those things!" "There are Macs on Mars!" Bleah.

    And before you mod me down, realize that I'm an unrepentant Mac user and an Apple Authorized Service Tech.

  23. Monopoly issues? by sammyo · · Score: 3, Funny

    Shouldn't each rover be required to have a different OS? I mean this must just quash the Martian software industry.

  24. space shuttle uses 1969-vintage ibm 360 computers by peter303 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The space shuttles run on five AP-101 computers, originally designed in 1969. The started with 32 kilowords of magnetic core memory for radiation protection, since upgraded to semiconductor memory. These computers were chosen due to their success in the Apollo, Skylab, and B52. For science and personal work the astronaut specialists usually bring personal laptops which are thousnds of times more performant.

  25. Re:But The Question is.. by millahtime · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The response time to an interupt is the big thing though. You have to have the garunteed interupt response time. With a real time OS you get that after every iunstruction. With Linux 2.4 that wasn't really there which they remedied in 2.6 but it isn't true real time. For machines like this, planes, space shuttles and cars you will find a real time OS. Would you want your drive by wire response time to be 200 micro seconds or 4000 microseconds. In reality that makes a difference.

    --
    Evolution or ID?
  26. Processor is *not* a PowerPC by GileadGreene · · Score: 5, Informative
    radiation-shielded, 20MHz PowerPC machines

    No, they're not.

    The processors in MER are RAD6000's, which are radiation-hardened versions of the RS/6000, the predecessor to the PowerPC (see this for details). The RAD6000's younger brother, the RAD750, is indeed a rad-hardened PowerPC.

    As an aside, there is a big difference between a radiation-shielded processor and a radiation-hardened processor. Shielding implies just sticking some kind of rad-absorbent material between the processor and the environment. A rad-hardened processor is actually manufactured in a different way - different gate layout, different design rules, often different materials (Silicon-on-Insulator is popular). These things are done to minimize or prevent the effects of single-event upsets (when a bit is flipped by high-energy particles) and single-event latchups (which basically turn a couple of gates into a glorified short-to-ground). The materials changes may also improve the overall total dose tolerance of the processor. The work required for redesign is one of the reasons that space-qualified rad-hard processors lag the commercial market. The NASA Office of Logic Design has some good papers on space processors available online if you're interested in learning more.

    1. Re:Processor is *not* a PowerPC by addaon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Rad750, btw, is a deeply cool chip. Once it's mature enough to start using for scientific-level stuff, it will be a real revolution in what we can do. One of the limitations with Hubble was that it had so little processing, a full data dump needed to be done for even checking orientation; there was no ability to offload processing to the sat. If the 750, or something similar (not that I know of anything too similar) is up there for our next big telescope, it will make a real difference in the efficiency of how it is used.

      --

      I've had this sig for three days.
  27. Ask Slashdot? by snake_dad · · Score: 3, Funny
    While JPL scientists have expressed confidence they can overcome the problem, possibly in a matter of weeks, the hardware and software manufactures behind the computer system are more than ready to help.

    "If they ask, we come," Blackman said, echoing the enthusiasm of BAE officials. "I think when something like this happens, the whole community responds to it."

    Maybe they should put up an image of the data, the diagrams of the systemboard, and descriptions of the symptoms, and submit it to Ask Slashdot. I'm sure there are a couple of VxWorks experts here who'd love to take a crack at this :)

    --
    karma capped .sig seeking available Slashdot poster for long-term relationship.
  28. Had to remove some parts... by mnemotronic · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's some Ok hardware, given the source (primative carbon-based species). We removed the antennas & cameras, and turned it into a coffee table. The CPU was slower than most MDAs (martianal data assistants), but provided us with a laugh. Junior ate the instrument package before we could stop him. Naughty grzybfyx!
    Thanks.

    Sincerely, Marvin & Family

    --
    The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
  29. No, not PowerPC... by noselasd · · Score: 2, Informative

    No. Its a RAD6000 CPU. Not entierly your stock PowerPC chip.
    RAD6000

  30. I want some real specs. by yaff · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hang MPU and the OS. What's this thing using to communicate back to the earth-men? Are they still using a Motorola 400MHz walkie-talkie as Sojurner did to its base station? Or are they up in the GHz range now to get better gain from tiny dishes? More importantly, what frequency is it squawking so I can run out and build a Pringles can phased-array to hear it. The world wants to know these things!

  31. They used to use sapphire... by emil · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...as the substrate of the chip, rather than a silicon wafer, so the chip was a "sapphire" chip rather than a silicon chip (although doped silicon could then be used to form transistors, as could Gallium Arsenide or Germanium, through the regular lithographic process).

    This is the classic "Silicon On Insulator." IBM has a process of embedding a layer of glass beneath the surface of a standard silicon wafer, allowing SOI using silicon substrates. This and their work with copper set them apart from the other large silicon transisitor foundries (TSMC, Intel, etc.).

    The processors on the rovers are probably SOI, but I don't know which process is used.

  32. Re:Is there a Linux is space yet? by vasqzr · · Score: 2, Interesting


    NASA has been evaluating it...

    On a related note, they use NVIDIA/Linux setups to view the Mars Rover data.

    Article

  33. Re:20 MHz is not enough by 32bitwonder · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No? My 25Mhz Macintosh LC III is enough to host a webserver running Linux & Apache. It even runs PHP. The 20Mhz PPC CPU used in the rovers is most likely quite a bit faster than the 68030 in the LC III.

    --
    www.brownsauce.org
  34. RAD6000s seem closest to PPC601s by questamor · · Score: 3, Informative

    One chart I've seen of IBM's POWER chips and their derivatives had an entire section devoted to the PPC chips, and the RAD6000 wasn't included in these, but was an offshoot to the side, branching just before the PPC601.

    By all other standards however, they seem to be closely related in time and technology to the 601, which powered Powermac 6100, 7100, 8100, 9150, 7200, 8200 and 7500 PPCs, as well as I think, one of IBM's thinkpads.

    Those 601s are a very nice chip, and quite underestimated at what they can do at low clock speeds. If the RAD6000 is anywhere similar, I can understand why it was picked.

    1. Re:RAD6000s seem closest to PPC601s by badasscat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Those 601s are a very nice chip, and quite underestimated at what they can do at low clock speeds. If the RAD6000 is anywhere similar, I can understand why it was picked.

      I doubt it, because it probably had little to do with performance. I read an article a while back (tried to Google it now, couldn't find it) that said NASA is generally about ten years behind consumer PC's in terms of the CPU speeds they send into space. These things have to go through so much testing for reliability, etc. that it often takes that long to certify a CPU for space flight. When they do find a CPU they can certify, they'll often continue using it for years. They won't just stick the latest PPC chip in a vehicle, assuming it's the same as the last one, only faster. That's the quickest way I can think of to disaster.

      Not much CPU power is really needed for space flight, though, and there's not really much point in taking along more than you need. We went to the moon using slide rules. We can make it to Mars on 20mhz chips - and I'll bet the only reason we even need that much power is for the scientific experiments on the surface. Speed is not really the primary concern on space missions.

  35. Re:I hope the flash memory was not commodity hardw by mo^ · · Score: 2

    Indeedy! hopefully we can get some cool figures back from one or the other.

    I was thinking about this when beagle packed up. If the beagle unit is so "cheap" (i seem to recall 50million ?) compared to the rovers, then i was wondering why nasa and the beagle team couldnt cooperate and literally carpet bomb mars with beagles.. ....

    Just random thinking from a brit who REALLY wanted to see the beagle work.

    Nice work to NASA though.

    --
    bah!*@%!
  36. Re:But The Question is.. by noselasd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No, the response time really isn't _the_ big thing. It ofcouse have to be fast but it's how reliable it is. That is, what response times it guarantees. While e.g. Linux sometimes can have much faster response time than some RTOS's, it's still no guarantee that latency is good _all the time_. Having response times ranging randomly from say 0,1ms-0,5s (which might be the case on general purpose OS'es) is alot worse than having a *guaranteed* response time of e.g. 0.5-1.0ms

  37. FPGA's by retostamm · · Score: 4, Interesting
    There are also Xilinx FPGA's in the Rover. Cool thing because they can be reconfigured if you find a bug while the thing is in transit.

    Xilinx radiation-tolerant Virtex(TM) FPGAs are being used in the "main brain" of the rover vehicle, controlling the motors for the wheels, steering, arms, cameras and various instrumentation, enabling the vehicle to travel about the planet.

    They also controlled the Pyrotechnical stuff during landing.

    [Disclaimer: I work for this great company.]

    --
    get 7 free Japanese lessons.
    1. Re:FPGA's by yaff · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The last time I read Xilinx's line on "radiation-tolerance" it was that you could reprogram (or refresh) sections of a Virtex while the rest of the chip was in use. So if a stray gamma particle flips a bit in your configuration SRAM you can reset it.

      This seems more like radiation-dodging rather than tolerance.

  38. RAD6K by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    I am an engineer that works with the RAD6K processor boards. A couple of observations here.

    1. The RAD6K really does run at 20 Mhz. They're creakingly slow. They're spec'd to run up to 33 Mhz, but the customer can get them to clock at lower speeds (I've seen them run at 12.5 Mhz). The only drawback is the PCI bus is also clocked as the same speed as the CPU. This is a mixed bag - but a slower PCI bus helps improves signal integrity and decreases power consumption.
    2. The board is PCI, but NOT compact PCI. There is a proprietary PCI connector and a proprietary PCI backplane. You cannot plug commercial PCI products unless you have an adapter to interface to the proprietary PCI connectors.
    3. For those who are not aware, there are three types of memory being used on the rovers. There is the SRAM (the RAD6K boards use SRAMs, not DRAMs), the EEPROM, and apparently, FLASH RAM. The EEPROM and the SRAM are on the processor board itself - there is probably more EEPROM memory in the system on another board. The EEPROM usually holds the flight code, and there are usually two copies. An original version that was launched with the spacecraft, and one patched version made possible via uplinks.
    4. I am amazed at the presence of FLASH RAM's. I am not aware of any rad-hardened FLASH RAM devices for spaceflight use. In addition to radiation hardness, the device must be made reliable with an approved QML-Q or V manufacturing flow. Radiation hardness is just icing on the cake, but the key is that the device must be reliable to withstand temperature extremes, shock and vibration. So, I have yet to see a FLASH RAM device that can be used. I am aware of the Chalcogenide based RAM's which are essientially uses the same substrates on CD-ROMs as memory cells. These products are hard to come by right now and are a high risk because we don't have sufficient data and flight heritage. A catch-22 in flight design is if it hasn't flown before, we don't want to fly it. But at some point, someone has to fly the first generation (someone who is willing to take a huge risk). Anyway, the FLASH RAM's on the rovers are in all likelihood upscreened commercial products. In other words, a mass buy of an entire lot of dies of commercial FLASH RAM's may have been bought, packaged in-house or through a vendor, and then screened for reliablity at extended specifications. This is not the same as the manufacturer who can guarantee the specs by design by designing it from the outset with increased reliability in mind.
    5. Radiation shielding? Minimal at best! The RAD6K shields its SRAMs by placing it on the underside of the processor board and orienting it such that the particles hit the processor side of the board instead of the RAM side of the board. There is some degree of radiation shielding for particles of sufficiently low energy. The truly high speed particles are going to get through and the only thing that will truly stop them is shielding whose thickness is measured in feet. That amount of shielding is too heavy for launch. The best we can do is mitigate the effects of radiation by guaranteeing devices can withstand a certain amount of radation dosage (measured in kRads) and design for latchup protection (latchup is a parasitic condition in which an ionizing particle impacts a transistor structure in a way that causes a SCR to be formed and a runaway current condition is initated leading to the device being burned out by high currents). Radiation effects in the form of SEE's (single event effects) such as bit flips can be mitigated by redundancy and voting circuits, memory scrubbing, and error checking using checksums/CRC's.
    1. Re:RAD6K by demachina · · Score: 4, Informative

      "A catch-22 in flight design is if it hasn't flown before, we don't want to fly it. But at some point, someone has to fly the first generation (someone who is willing to take a huge risk)."

      Or you fly it as a non mission critical experimental payload which is what we did back in the day I worked on avionics. You fly it as an experimental package so it gets the stress but if it breaks either its not in the mission critical loop, or if it is in the loop you can switch back to proven hardware. I kind of assumed this would be a standard part of qualifying electronics for space flight as well though its obviously a lot more expensive. Its not feasible to test it on Mars due the expense but you could test it in geostationary orbit where it will get lots of radiation and temperature extremes, as well as launch vibration and G's.

      --
      @de_machina
  39. make a firewall? by SilverGiant · · Score: 3, Funny

    .

    "I wonder if I could make a nice firewall with one of these for my home network..."

    1. build computer
    2. drop off on mars on way to grocery
    3. laugh in face of hacking
    4. reconsider when computer mistaken by rover for new type of rock, drilled for mineral content

  40. Mission control software is in Java by danwiz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As noted in a previous slashdot posting, the software in the control room was written in Java.

    A ZDNet article says Java made communicating between multiple software pieces very flexible and James Gosling, inventor of Java, spent considerable time helping develop the system. Sun also describes how the same application was used for the Pathfinder mission back in 1997.

  41. The CPU is POWER, not PPC by rshadowen · · Score: 4, Informative
    The RAD6000 is based on a POWER CPU called RSC (RIOS single chip) - it's not a PPC chip. This was a design that consolidated the 5 - 6 chip RIOS processor complex onto a single lower performance die for low end workstations. I worked on the development team at IBM.

    The RSC design played a key role in bringing Apple and Motorola together with IBM to create the PowerPC line of CPUs. The 601 was the first PPC and was basically a redesign of RSC. It supported both POWER and PPC architectures, although there were deviances from PPC since the architecture was actually being defined at the time we were working on the chip.

    The RAD6000 version of the design happened because IBM wanted to pursue some government contracts, so had the RSC specially qualified. Another group then took the design and performed the radiation hardening.

    After Pathfinder we had some cool IBM/Mars posters hanging around the building, but oddly enough they vanished very quickly...

    --
    "I want my job to be the guy who kicks George Bush in the face all day, only stopping to make out with him."
  42. Re:20 MHz is not enough by Ignorant+Aardvark · · Score: 2, Funny

    My 25Mhz Macintosh LC III is enough to host a webserver running Linux & Apache.

    Post a link to your website and then we'll reconsider your statement ...

    --
    Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
  43. Same problem three times by DunbarTheInept · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Redundancy is useful for handling hardware errors, but this problem was in the software that keeps track of the flash filesystem. So having three computers would just mean you get the same problem three times, and your expensive redundancy would have bought you nothing. (They are having to take steps to make sure Opportunity doesn't encounter the same problem.)

    --

    Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.

  44. Re:NASA is run by idiots... by egomaniac · · Score: 3, Informative

    Are all the millions of dollars spent on full for the rockets?! Why the fuck is my home system more advanced than NASA's? You'd think they'd of at least used a design similar to a Dual G4 or maybe even a Dual Xeon or P4. Can someone explain to me why NASA gets millions of dollars if they are using 1990 equipment?

    A) They don't need to play Doom 3 up there. 20MHz is sufficient for almost anything you would want to do on Mars. Why send up more than you need to?

    B) Your computer runs far hotter and consumes far more power than the Mars rovers do. Power is at a premium when you're millions of miles away from the nearest electrical outlet.

    C) The rovers are radiation-hardened. Your system is not. Your computer would last about twelve minutes in space before it locked up. A big part of radiation hardening is using larger (and therefore slower) transistors.

    D) It takes years to certify a particular piece of equipment as spaceworthy. NASA isn't going to just pop in the latest and greatest Athlon and assume it will work "because the last one did". That means that anything flying into space is automatically going to be at least a few years behind the curve.

    --
    ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
  45. Re:space shuttle uses 1969-vintage ibm 360 compute by greygent · · Score: 2, Informative

    The B-52G/H models used 3 ACUs each composed of (if I recall correctly) 4 Z-80 processors. i'm not sure about the number of CPUs in each systemn, but I am sure of the processors. These systems were loaded (very slowly) via tape, and they ran the RADAR and bombing computer subsystems.

    I'm not sure which computers this article is referring to, but it may have been an earlier revision of the computer system in the B-52.

    The only other computer system I can think of in the B-52s was the ECM system, and since it was highly classified, and I did not work on that system, I'm not overly sure.

    For a little extra karma whoring, i'll relate a funny story. Our base, which shall remain nameless, would fly early morning ECM sorties while people were driving into work.

    Their target signals for jamming? The radar guns the cops used in their speed traps to try and catch our folks driving into work. Apparently, the cops finally caught on and complained at the high number of equipment failures with their radar gun equipment.

  46. Re:Sigh by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm sure an asteroid that was pelted by the exhaust from a nuke rocket would have very detectable levels of those isotopes.

    *Groan* Uranium is COMMON in asteroids. My engines would use no more than a few tens of pounds of uranium. Worst case, we'll say it uses a few hundred pounds. How is the particulate matter being exhausted by my engines anywhere near the TONS of uranium contained in many asteroids? In fact, most Uranium on Earth is from the tons that burn up in the atmosphere every year.

    As for point #4, you do change things by existing, but you can try to be intelligent about HOW you change things. If I lived on an island with only 20 coconut trees I would not burn them for light and warmth. I'd burn any other wood I could find even if it was inferior to palm trees.

    But if you lived on an island with hundreds of thousands of palm trees, would you really feel bad about burning a few for a fire? Remember, a ship will burn/expel *pounds* of uranium. (Much of which will be some other substance after use.) How does that compare to the BILLIONS OF TONS in the solar system?

    Also, natural uranium fires probably didn't spew crap into the air like a nuke blast, most of what was burning probably stayed in the ground.

    The "crap spewed" doesn't stay in the air very long. Uranium is too heavy. Carbon dating was messed up from radiation pulses. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm sorry that makes life harder for geologists, but that's an unfortunate part of life. How many archeological digs were made harder by robbers, tourists, curious natives, etc, who had all previously wandered the area? It's a fact of life. Space geologists are going to have to get used to the fact that engines will alter things slightly. Possibly, many of them won't care since it's so little. The ones who do, will have to figure out how to work around it.

    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  47. As a former Windriver employee... by PinkyGigglebrain · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I can give you some answers.

    The fire wall is easy to set up, but the cost of the single VxWorks license would put you in hock for a year or so.

    The OS itself needs less memory than you would think. For the rover I would guess the OS image is about 500K to 1M, but that doesn't say anything about how much memory its really using for the OS since it can run out of FLASH and leave the 128M of RAM for the stacks used by the tasks (individual RTOS proccess). I would imagine a lot of that RAM is being used for holding the images while they are being sent back to Earth or evaluated for navigation info.

    The PowerPC its using is just a radiation hardend version a common CPU, I don't know which, and you can do a lot with a 20Mhz PPC. The training department used 860 PPC/20Mhz in the classes and never had any issues with task execution times, at least not until the system clock was cranked up to absurededly high speeds.

    Unfortunatly for hobbiests and hackers everywhere Windriver has never came out with a "Personel" or non-comercial version of their software/license packages, despite one of the instructors pushing for it every chance he got. Managment at Windriver didn't go for the idea, in fact when they started shuting down the training department that instructore was the first to go. So much for Wind River encouraging inovation by the private developer.

    Bottom line is that VxWorks is a great OS, versital to the point that someone even ported Doom onto it and ran it on a Kodak digital camera. However, in my opinion, the company is a bit lacking in the area of inspirering creative inovation and development by anyone who is not representing a MAJOR company/organisation like JPL or Boeing.

    If you really want to try out a firewall on a real-time OS give QNX a shot, they have (last time I checked) a free development tools package that included a non-comercial "hobbiest" license for x86 CPUs and it supports USB, ethernet, openGL, and just about everything else VxWorks does.