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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.
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.
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
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.