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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!
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.
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"?
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.
Looks like they are using an RTOS that is commonly used.
http://www.ghs.com/customers/n...
Pretty cool system
I noticed that Intersil still makes a rad-hard variant of the awful RCA 1802. (you know, the CPU in a COSMAC ELF).
When I saw that, I figured NASA and or the DoD probably give them enough money to make it worth their while... so they must use that antique for something.
Sent from my PDP-11
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.
Exactly.
Rocket science ain't ... uh... never mind. But it doesn't take a lot of computing power to navigate. But what it takes is computers that can withstand the stress. Extreme acceleration, radiation, possibly temperature changes, unreliable power supply and so on. When you only need one percent of the processing power of a modern CPU, you don't care about having only 10% of the current CPU power available. But it is very comforting to hear "works from 3-5V, logic accepts up to 6V on its I/Os without damage" instead of "if you're off by 0.2V, unpredictable behaviour might occur, be off by 0.5 and it's going poof".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My guess is that they have a truckload in storage already made. It would not make sense for them to not make them available for sale in exotic applications. It's a proven design being (that can use a minimum of other expensive rad hardened parts) used in other proven designs so they can pull them off the shelf and have something ready to fly quickly. As parent poster noted, for many applications 64 bits can be overkill. They could also being used for repair for things like military aircraft that used them in their manufacture in that era and are still flying.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
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!
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.