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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.
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!
... 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.
I'd still be using the dual 32-bit Xeon box that I've got if the motherboard hadn't become bored with life and stopped POSTing. The board dates to 2001 and the processors to 2003 or so. Yes, I was capped at 4gb RAM, but it it was rock-steady and reliable right up until the end.
I've replaced it with a newer dual-Xeon box, this one with dual quad-core processors and 12GB of ECC memory. It was college-surplus and I got it cheap. I expect that it'll last a decade.
If an electronic device does everything that you need it to do within the timetable that you need, then the concept of obsolescence hasn't yet come into play. We're using 4+ year old smartphones. They do everything we need them to do and they're still in pretty good shape. We have no desire to replace them as new ones aren't good enough to show significant usable improvement. We either wait for a paradigm shift or for the current devices to no longer meet our needs while a replacement would. That works for vehicles, for home appliances, for consumer electronics, for furniture, for all manner of things. Spending money because something is advertised as new is foolish without determining if one will actually benefit from that new thing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Yes, the ruggedness is the main priority. Once a piece of hardware is certified and flight-tested, you have so much invested in the computer design that you don't want to just throw away the design because there are faster chips for sale.
And there's the question of whether the extra processing power is beneficial for the task at hand. Why pay more for extra processing power that isn't used anyway? There's likely a finer degree of control and timing now, but it's not like reentry physics has gotten more complicated in the past 12 years.
An 8086/8088 would be enough to get this thing into orbit.
I used to work in avionics. We never used anything as powerful as an 8086. It was all 8051s. They are rad-hard, can withstand lots of voltage jitter, and the logic has already been verified down to the gate and transistor level. The 8051 has certified compilers, assemblers, and linkers, that have been formally verified. They are also dual sourced, which is usually a requirement.
Which were built using 2800 integrated circuits interconnected by wire-wrapping, every single one of those ICs containing exactly two NOR gates.
What's awesome about that is it's like something you'd see at a maker fair today,except that hardly anyone knows about wire wrapping these days. Too bad; it's faster, more reliable and more repairable than soldering.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Truth be told: I work at a *ahem!* major microprocessor manufacturer, and even the cutting-edge SoC's we're working on right now, that are not even close to being at a stepping ready to be released into the market, still have an embedded 8051 in them. Being myself old enough to have had a CDP1802-based computer, built entirely by hand on perfboard when I was back in high school, I just have to laugh at anyone who actually believes that you have to have multi-core, multi-gigahertz-clocked processors with gigabytes of memory for any given application. I laugh even harder at kids who think you have to have at least a microcontroller, if not a Raspberry Pi board, to make an LED blink on and off; they think I'm trolling them when I tell them that two bipolar transistors and a few passive components will do the same job.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!