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Orion Capsule Safely Recovered, Complete With 12-Year-Old Computer Guts
Lucas123 writes While NASA's Orion spacecraft, which blasted off on a successful test flight today, may be preparing for a first-of-its-kind mission to carry astronauts to Mars and other deep-space missions, the technology inside of it is no where near leading edge. In fact, its computers and its processors are 12 years old — making them ancient in tech years. The spacecraft, according to one NASA engineer, is built to be rugged and reliable in the face of G forces, massive amounts of radiation and the other rigors of space."Compared to the [Intel] Core i5 in your laptop, it's much slower — much less powerful. It's probably not any faster than your smartphone," Matt Lemke, NASA's deputy manager for Orion's avionics, power and software team, told Computerworld. Lemke said the spacecraft was built to be rugged and reliable — not necessarily smart. That's why there are two flight computers. Orion's main computer was built by Honeywell as a flight computer originally for Boeing's 787 jet airliner.
Not only was the launch itself successful, but the sensor-laden craft's splashdown was smooth ("bulls-eye," as NASA puts it), and NASA has now recovered the capsule. ABC News has some good photos, too.
of Orion?
"so what"??
"stupid canon shell"??
sheesh..
I get sick to my stomach when I hear Ruby and JavaScript weenies go on and on about how they're "engineers".
No, you shitheads, you aren't "engineers". The people who work on Orion are engineers. Some high school dropout writing web apps in Ruby is not an engineer in any way!
I still have a computer that's 12 years old with a 3 GHz processor. It's not slower than a laptop today, because processor speeds plateaued 12 years ago.
Goddamn hipsters. Get. off. my. lawn.
It probably does need to be explained why this is entirely expected, and even a good thing.
The clock speed is the same but I guarantee even the lowest end AMD would destroy anything 12 years old in terms of work.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
... just feels kinda weird. This is basically a scaled down repeat of an Apollo test mission done nearly 50 years ago. At least then the Saturn V launch rocket was being tested as well.
The more exciting mission comes later month with SpaceX attempting a powered soft landing of a first stage on a mission delivering cargo to orbit. Small chance of success on the first attempt. But if successful, that will be something never seen before and once thought to be impractical, if not impossible. It will also be a major step in greatly reducing the cost for access to space and something much more liable to impact the lives of everyday people.
In fact, its computers and its processors are 12 years old
They word it like NASA is dumpster diving for its flight computers these days. The CPU may be from what was new 12 years ago, but I seriously doubt the physical unit is actually 12 years old.
It's also hardened against radiation. I would be willing to bet that any processor in these systems will still be functional long after most newfangled home CPUs are long dead. These flight computers will be remain functional in an extremely harsh environment longer than any home CPU would last. Even with how pampered home processors are in comparison.
If you took your i5 into a high intensity radiation environment like space it would be more likely to have single event upsets whereas the processors that most space applications are hi-rel (hi reliability) and have been tested against radiation. A lot of the chips used in space are also built on silicon and in chip packages that are designed for these reasons. Guess what? If you are a chip designer and you want to build a radiation hardened chip, you usually don't get your hands on the latest designs and you don't get to fab a new version every 6 months. There are people still using 8051 chips that are 20 years old because they 1) Have been used before (really good if your spacecraft parts already have a history of working in space) 2) Have software already written for them from the last project (code that has worked before is good too). 3) can't easily find another part. On a cubesat mission that I helped design we did use a commercial chip that was not rad-hard because we were in a lower earth orbit with less radiation, although the spacecraft does lock up now and again. We almost went with an 8051, we used an FPGA for some of the critical stuff which are less susceptible in some ways to the spacetime environment.
From my mostly uneducated point of view, the concern isn't processing capacity but having a reliable source for parts. Is anyone still making PowerPC 750FX processors? If not, what's the shelf life on them? What about the ancillary chips/hardware? Nothing lasts forever, even if it's not being used.
What's with the "photo" of the 2nd stage / capsule separation? It looks distinctly like a 3D render, not an actual photo. Or if it is a real photo, how did they get it?
Please help metamoderate.
it should still be able to render porn at 30fps.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i'll bet you can fart "happy birthday" which is even more impressive..
This is Slashdot. We already know this. An 8086/8088 would be enough to get this thing into orbit. IT DOESN'T TAKE MUCH especially because NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED in the past three decades.
12 year old software? No way. We need to fix that. There's no way we're going to Mars without rounded corners, infinite scrolling,and a tiled UI. If we don't launch in beta, all the other countries will think we're not hip. We won't get seated on the Trilby committee at the UN. Get some interns and fresh grads on this project, pronto.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I recall that the CPU in my first computer (an RCA VIP, with an 1802 processor) was still being used in satellites and such years later. Why? The processor was fully static CMOS, could be run at extremely low power (as long as speed wasn't an issue), and was more tolerant of radiation. But I guess I'm showing my age ...
I bet China isn't running 12 year old parts on their rockets.
Looks like they are using an RTOS that is commonly used.
http://www.ghs.com/customers/n...
Pretty cool system
So the galaxy may just be on Orion's belt!
If older computers can do the job and are known to be reliable in this environment, then using them is the correct choice. We sent people to the moon, and Voyager to multiple outer planets with much older computer technology.
If newer computers would provide improved performance IN THIS APPLICATION then they are worth considering.
Wait, when did the F-14 maneuver without a pilot?
I mean seriously, every "smart"phone is now much faster than anything scientists had till the 1980s... yet since you are unable to write programs for it without the need of other computers, you cannot do anything they did.
On the other hand, if you had a "digital television set" in the 1980s, yes those existed, you had a device with much more processing power than the computer you could have on your desk. The problem was that your TV-set had it in hard wired circuits while your PC didn't even have the IO capacity to get the video signal in. (Digital TVs in the 1980s used digital chips to process the analogue signal, so they would digitize your PAL signal, typically with 7 Bits, and then decode PAL in the digital domain, which can bring you much better pictures at improved reliability and eventually decreased cost)
The power of a computer lies in it's capability to be programmed. If you cannot reprogram a computer, it's no more useful than any single function device.
Having programmed the 8048 and 8051 in assembly language I can appreciate the tech. However I think the 12-year old technology label is probably referring to something like the RAD750. Its roughly a hardened PowerPC G3 at 200 Mhz, sort of comparable to what was in the original iMac. I think the RAD750 was used on some of the Mars missions.
Manned space capsules have been maneuvering since the 1950s. They don't merely fly ballistic trajectories. Maneuvering for orbital rendezvous is one of the most difficult things a pilot can do. Many an F-14 pilot would trade the F-14 plus their left testicle/ovary to get to pilot a space capsule, similar story for nearly every other jet fighter flown since the 1950s.
And if the Orion was just as reliable you would have random lockups and the software performing differently on different days of the week ...
Radiation hardened electronics is very expensive so you are not going to have (or need) the latest and greatest. Reliability over bench marks is a key factor and you can't just buy a new mobo at New Egg. Aerospace stuff has to have a track record and can't be buggy.
To be honest. When F-14 was build MOS-LSI was state-of-the-art: http://www.firstmicroprocessor.com/
Looks like they are using an RTOS that is commonly used.
http://www.ghs.com/customers/n...
Pretty cool system
According to a press release, it's certified by the NSA to be EAL 6+:
http://www.ghs.com/news/20110307_Second_EAL6_SKPP.html
It's also certified by the FAA:
http://www.ghs.com/news/230210r.html
We went to the moon and back with 40+ year-old computers...
The MPC565 is pretty standard in Airospace. Has all the features you need and not more:
* Clock: in the low MHz range. Pretty easy to make transmission reliable, even if a PCB trace is damaged or the board deteriorates.
* No MMU: Why the hell would i put a MMU in a Controller which should perform identical operations over 5years-40years and has no additional unplanned tasks, and is running software which is somewhere between well tested (level D) and insane (level A). The complexity of a MMU is incompatible with ceritfying this thing as level A (critical) for any reasonable price.
* big SRAM on chip. Buffer the voltage to the processor well and it does not matter to you if the clock fluctuates wildly.
* Flash on chip. (for program storage). So you can be pretty sure that as long as your program runs, it will run well.
That being said it should be mentioned that a variant of TFTP (35years old) is the standard for Loading SW onto parts in Planes.
"640 K ought to be enough for anybody"
Not only does the link to ABC have a shitty autoplaying video, but the picture are literally cropped from the live stream, nothing remotely good about those pictures.
CAPSULE RETURNS, AND SO DOES CONTENTS.
Really slashdot? Were they expecting it to be empty?
This site is real garbage sometimes.
This makes me wonder what the development process is like in non-commercial environments versus commercials ones. COCOMO is supposed to let you estimate the time and costs of a project but that hinges on your estimation of the number of lines of code. The model also assumes that the average programmer can create a certain number of lines of code per day. Seems to me that this pace is MUCH slower in aerospace than it is at Google or Facebook. So perhaps COCOMO needs to be revised with an industry factor.
This also makes me wonder how old SpaceX's computers are.
I have been in computers since the very early 80's starting with an Apple II. From then to about 2008 I have aquired or upgraded my computer about every 3 years or less. I am currently using a machine that is over 8 years old. Quad core Dell Precision 390. Still performs well enough to play modern game titles like Mech Warrior online. At no previous time could I say I would be satisfied using an 8 year old computer. Moores law has slowed to a crawl compared to what it was doing in the 90's. So a 12 years old computer today is closer to modern perfomance that at any time I can remember.
--- I wish I could buy items falling under that description.
My home server is an old blue and white Apple G3 running Yellow Dog.
Sure I've added a Sata card and a GB Ethernet a while back and it's got 6 TB in a software raid.
But it's a server, why would a server ever need more processor, all it does is read/write stuff between Ethernet and disk. I'll keep running it until it finally dies.
Methinks you're just sore because Orion made it back.
it makes me feel very very impressed.
why bother flying spacecraft when you can fart your way into world fame?
oh, and, of course, be sure to poop on everyone who can't fart quite as eloquently as your impassive self :-)
There are only a handful of space qualified microprocessors available. Most of them were designed 20+ years ago. In fact this is the case for most space qualified ICs of all types. Nothing that goes into space with the expectation of high reliability uses modern high speed circuitry because smaller features result in greater error rates and a shorter operational lifetime due to radiation effects. It is also cost prohibitive to develop a modern fab line to manufacture space grade parts so the industry is mostly stuck in the past using older designs largely due to reliability requirements.
The Java set despairs that they can't play in their perfect abstraction of a machine without gobs of memory and CPU cycles to blow away. People who know how to program bare metal can get by perfectly fine on a "slow" memory constrained device.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
There are two approaches to radiation tolerant computing. One is to make the processors hardened to radiation. These processors are usually slower, and use an architecture with fewer knowledgable computer programmers. This seems to be the approach on Orion.
In contrast, the Space X Dragon Capsule uses multiple processors operating simultaneously to create a fault tolerant system. To quote:
Dragon uses a "radiation-tolerant" design in the electronic hardware and software that make up its flight computers. The system uses three pairs of computers, each constantly checking on the others, to instantiate a fault-tolerant design. In the event of a radiation upset or soft error, one of the computer pairs will perform a soft reboot.[45] Including the six computers that make up the main flight computers, Dragon employs a total of 18 triple-processor computers.[45]
An advantage of this is that the processors are far faster. There are also many more trained programmers available for these more current architectures. Such systems arguably have similar (or better?) radiation tolerance to the older hardened processors.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It has to be fast enough to do a specific list of tasks, but any extra speed is useless and the tasks may not change for decades. Any investment in extra speed detracts from what could be gained in reliability, temperature range, power efficiency and cost. There are also plenty of cases where consumer devices don't have to be any different from a decade ago, except that you have been brainwashed by heavy marketing and hastily written inefficient software.
Our experiment flies at 60,000 ft MSL with hardware certified for 45,000. That little bit of difference in altitude gets our single event upset rate over the certification limit. We've got quad-string redundancy to protect from this, but we're averaging a single event upset on flight (not space) qualified equipment every 120 hours. One charged particle can cause a single event upset in hardware not rad hardened. A single event upset in DNA will be repaired by the cell. People are much more rad-hard than most modern processors and memory.
Don't laugh. NEVER laugh. You'd be bitching if they were out in the streets in gangs, stealing your stuff, vandalizing your property, or any of that other shit old people complain about. Instead, you have a youth who has a desire to learn and invent something which will hopefully lead them into being a productive member of society instead of serving 20 to life for cooking meth. Young folks, especially in the high school age range, are easily discouraged and you ridiculing them about being too hipster or whatever will only alienate them. When faced with this situation, I will show them how to blink that LED with their Arduino, then show them how to blink it over a USB port with their gaming rig, then show them how to blink it with a mechanical cam switch (old points distributors work great for that fyi). If I've got some lying around, I'll show them how to blink it with some vacuum tubes! What you have to do is find out why they chose to do it the way the are doing it (typically because that's all they know) and then show them all the choices available, why you'd use each one in a different application, and show them why they get to use that Arduino now instead of wire wrapping an 1802 on perfboard. The key to all of this, I've found, is maintaining the balance between lengthy enough to get the concept across but short enough to keep them from picking up their phone and tweeting their facepage.
/. is always posting stories about how we need more STEM graduates, more hardware hackers, and more programmers. A lot of folks here agree with that sentiment and perhaps you've said as much in the past, so please, don't ever laugh at them. They're sensitive.
Besides, grandpa, you should be happy the hipster Makers are doing what they do. Thanks to steampunk, vacuum tubes(especially nixies) are making a huge come back. I have a USB vacuum tube audio amp similar to this. You couldn't buy that shit when we were kids. You had that 100lb behemoth amp that made the house lights dim when the bass hit, and kept your room 80deg during the coldest of winters. And that was if you had a good bit of money. If you had a little money you might be able to buy a Heathkit. Otherwise, like me, you cobbled together some barely functional and noisy bullshit from an old guitar amp and a half working tube powered CB radio. Now you can get something handheld portable for a hundred bucks with the further satisfaction that your "dying" craft is actually living on and they'll need people like you to teach the new gen.
The overall point is, no matter how they get to the destination, what really matters is that they're taking the journey. Time itself will teach them when they need to blink that LED with an RPi or if they need to use a couple transistors.
DISCLAIMER: I am dense at times. If "laugh at" was just a figure of speech, please don't take the post personally- perhaps someone else can be inspired.
I don't like that pussy at all. YOU were the one fucking it. I'm not some kind of sicko who likes to bang his mom.
.
More complex/sophisticated/environmentally robust equipment take much longer. Getting new avionics is a 3 to 5 years cycle. It even takes the military 3 to 10 years to get development done for earth bound hardware.
The Nuke industry/govt agencies require 'hardened' hardware, that takes about as long as getting military OK for use.
Space craft life cycle, to keep from continuously re-engineering the same system many times before the first flight is 'frozen' at a stage that seems way to early in most venues. But that is what has been found as needed to be safe and reliable. It also becomes a 'religious issue' about not touching systems once they are 'flight ready'. Many of the designs, since they are 'one off' are not designed to be upgraded, at least not hardware wise. Even software upgrades are hard due to the 'flight ready' validation process. So unless a 'mission critical' need for 'uber new' hardware/software is found, it isn't going to happen (at least not in any 'market speed' speeds). So yes, we fly 'ancient' but reliable hardware.
How to get around this? Go work for NASA, get more funding, make it a priority to fly 'less outdated' equipment. I watched John Glenn go into space on TV. I watched the first foot steps onto the moon, live. I am proud of every step we have taken.
We have had very few pay the price over the years, and part of that price of keeping the payment in lives low is flying over-tested, over-worked, over-priced, outdated hardware.
I do want to fly newer equipment, but I don't want less safety. Flying fewer manned missions, and more 'robot' missions with newer hardware is one choice, but I don't want to give up on manned exploration. (Before the haters chime in, man in this case is mankind, being inclusive, not exclusive, in gender, race, etc. I do dislike feeling like I need to include explanations whenever I use words correctly, or having to be PC otherwise.)
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Many people mention things like them being hardened and dependable, but another thing older technology has is that it can run on a lot less power. Which is pretty important when you are pretty much limited to solar power and whatever you have for batteries on hand which need to do a number of other things as well. Likely any savings on power conservation is more desirable than additional unneeded CPU cycles.