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Mars Rover Curiosity: Less Brainpower Than Apple's iPhone 5

Posted by timothy on from the when-I-was-a-boy-we-didn't-have-mars dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "To give the Mars Rover Curiosity the brains she needs to operate took 5 million lines of code. And while the Mars Science Laboratory team froze the code a year before the roaming laboratory landed on August 5, they kept sending software updates to the spacecraft during its 253-day, 352 million-mile flight. In its belly, Curiosity has two computers, a primary and a backup. Fun fact: Apple's iPhone 5 has more processing power than this one-eyed explorer. 'You're carrying more processing power in your pocket than Curiosity,' Ben Cichy, chief flight software engineer, told an audience at this year's MacWorld."

12 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Just goes to show. . . by MagusSlurpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    . . . how wasteful most commercial software packages are.

    --
    My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
    1. Re:Just goes to show. . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, good comparison.

      Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on code for a very specific purpose compared to anything else.

    2. Re:Just goes to show. . . by smittyoneeach · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or how bloody-minded comparisons tell you little. The reason you need horsepower on the board is not because computations are bearish. Rather, all the human interface code.
      I worked on government systems two decades ago that had four-decade old technology and worked great. Why? All the user interface agony was offloaded to dedicated consoles.
      Case in point: which is harder to code against: a command line interface, or a full-on GUI?

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    3. Re:Just goes to show. . . by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ". . . how wasteful most commercial software packages are."

      That's certainly true. And the huge volume of our data, too, but mostly software. I have programs on my computer that are easily 20 times the size of entire hard drive of one of our office computers back in 1994... and that hard drive contained a complete install of Microsoft Office as well as Lotus 1-2-3 for those who didn't like Excel. With lots of room to spare. As a long-time programmer, I celebrate the increases in capability we have seen over the years, but I decry the bloated inefficiency of much of our modern software. I would go so far as to say I am dismayed by it sometimes.

    4. Re:Just goes to show. . . by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, if you're doing it in a modern software package like C# for example, there's little to no difference at all. I could write a stopwatch app... and the gui would have a single button and a display. The console version of which would be a lot harder to write. It all depends on what you're doing. Most GUIs make it easy to write for them, and offload a lot of their load onto the GPU.

      By the way, Curiosity's UI is still on earth... and on dozens of different computers at Nasa. It's kind of silly to say curiosity is only powered by this tiny processor.... that processor is just accepting and implementing commands. All the data crunching is happening back here on earth by massive banks of computers.

      P.S. Apple probably paid them to say this.

    5. Re:Just goes to show. . . by X0563511 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ... and where do you think the code to display that button came from? Not from C#, but from the .NET or Mono environment... which is... more code!

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  2. iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure, the iPhone 5 may have more processing power... But I bet if you put that thing in space, the first cosmic ray that comes along will happily crash the OS. Game over.

    Hardware in spaecraft has to be hardened big time against radiation. Off the shelf junk will NOT work. Just sayin'.

  3. power use and battery life have to be deal with as by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    power use and battery life have to be dealt with as well.

  4. That shouldn't impress anyone. by gTsiros · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Voyager 1/2 could run about 100K instructions per second, maybe less.

    It's about the objective, not raw processing power.

    And this is a fine opportunity! to pour some of my bile about the miserly state in which modern software is.

    --
    Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
  5. Not needing a foolproof UI is most of it by spiritplumber · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've written an universal autopilot in 2007 that fits in 32K of eeprom. I say that not to brag, but to mean that these things are not unusual. Software on PLCs and so on is often very small -- it also has to be very good at not crashing. Fortunately that's all it has to be: nobody cares if the scroll bar doesn't glow when it's hit the end and so on, it just has to keep the power plant working :)

    --
    Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
  6. Re:Why do they always have to refer to the iPhone? by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Maybe it's because of the fact that the speaker was addressing a crowd at Macworld...

    'You're carrying more processing power in your pocket than Curiosity,' Ben Cichy, chief flight software engineer, told an audience at this year's MacWorld.

    --
    Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
  7. Hmm by Ryanrule · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Is there any point to this article? This seems like one of those "your desktop has more power than the space shuttle" type shits of the 90's.