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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."

5 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 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.

    2. 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. 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.