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Looking At the Hardware and Software of NASA's New Horizons (imgtec.com)
alexvoica writes: Last week we learnt that Pluto has blue skies and ice water thanks to a series of high-resolution images provided by the New Horizons probe. But how is the probe taking these photographs and sending them back to NASA? What hardware and software systems are inside and who built them? Luckily, the New Horizons engineering team kindly answered these questions (and many others) in a detailed interview.
Here are some fun facts from my discussion with the engineers. The chipset: It might sound strange to some but NASA used to be a chip maker. Before using standard MIPS or Intel CPUs for probes like New Horizons, NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel. Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece and built using a grant from the Goddard Space Flight Center. The camera: New Horizons has a multispectral 1 megapixel camera; sending a single 1200 x 900 image back to earth takes approximately 3-4 hours. The comms: Forget 4G LTE, New Horizons uses the very best! The probe relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls. DSN is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecom system in the world and was also used to guide the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission back to earth. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon remain forever grateful. The memory: New Horizons includes 16GB of flash memory which provides plenty of storage space for photos and other scientific data. The operating system: New Horizons runs on Nucleus, a popular operating system designed by Mentor Graphics. Coincidentally, Nucleus is also at the heart of the ARTIK 1 platform for IoT launched by Samsung only a few months ago.
Here are some fun facts from my discussion with the engineers. The chipset: It might sound strange to some but NASA used to be a chip maker. Before using standard MIPS or Intel CPUs for probes like New Horizons, NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel. Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece and built using a grant from the Goddard Space Flight Center. The camera: New Horizons has a multispectral 1 megapixel camera; sending a single 1200 x 900 image back to earth takes approximately 3-4 hours. The comms: Forget 4G LTE, New Horizons uses the very best! The probe relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls. DSN is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecom system in the world and was also used to guide the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission back to earth. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon remain forever grateful. The memory: New Horizons includes 16GB of flash memory which provides plenty of storage space for photos and other scientific data. The operating system: New Horizons runs on Nucleus, a popular operating system designed by Mentor Graphics. Coincidentally, Nucleus is also at the heart of the ARTIK 1 platform for IoT launched by Samsung only a few months ago.
NASA was buying Intel 486 processors for the space shuttles from eBay.
relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls.
Good to see the alliance with Bajor is paying dividends.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Why not just use an off-the-shelf processor and put the PCBs in shielded, shock mounted enclosures?
In the dawn of Silicon Valley the fabs counted on NASA and Military orders. For quite a long time they could count on 70+% of the production going towards NASA and military contracts. Almost no one else could afford the products at the time. Eventually Intel broke that mold by making a huge bet that they could slash the product costs and a wave of volume would follow to make the price point profitable. It was a huge risk.
Seriously, what the fuck is going on there?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
We we learnt us some good English too while we were at it?
Isn't this the company who did the SciTech universal VESA drivers for DOS?
corporate welfare. For the price of one of those CPUs, we could provide nearly a thousand months of WIC. Of course, CONservatives would rather starve a child than give-up their welfare.
A decade ago I spent about two years on an embedded system running Nucleus, spent several months fixing bugs in the threading primitives, including the core spin-lock mutex that worked about 99.999% of the time under low-load conditions, but whose failure rate rose rapidly with load to about 2%. So much fun. Parts of that codebase looked like they were written by very low skill programmers.
Why not just use an off-the-shelf processor and put the PCBs in shielded, shock mounted enclosures?
Several reasons. 1) Weight matters. Adding shielding and enclosures adds weight and thus cost. Sometimes the cost of the component is dwarfed by the cost to launch said component. 2) Off the shelf hardware doesn't always work for applications like these for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's fine but not always. 3) A lot of this stuff was developed a LONG time ago and has to work with a lot of legacy systems. Off the shelf solutions don't always work for some of the problems they face. 4) Once they have a proven design, it is a non-trivial task to get a new piece of hardware qualified.
Btw since some people take that joke seriously, here's what actually happened :
NASA spent dozens of dollars buying pens built to write upside down. After selling a handful of "upside down" pens to NASA, the company started marketing it as the "Space Pen".
Initially, the Russians had a problem with cosmonauts inhaling graphite dust as they wrote, until they too spent $20 on pens.
On the other hand, the AVERAGE time between when the federal government orders a PC until it's booted is 4 1/2 years. So they order (and pay for) new computers, which are mostly deprecated by the time they power on for the first time. These bureaucratic delays create an opportunity for suppliers. They get a contract at market price for current-gen computer specs, then years later deliver outdated and therefore cheaper equipment.
Stop calling everything you don like fraud. This is not fraud. Cost plus acquisition or sole supplier.
I'm curious what the development process is, especially for the software. It seems to me it would be very bad to have a bug show up while you're trying to image Pluto. It has to be reliable and bug-free, to the greatest extent possible. What techniques and processes are used to have a high degree of confidence that the code they are developing is absolutely correct? Are some of those processes applicable to other types of software development, in which finding and fixing bugs is expensive, though not nearly as expensive?
I'd like to ask what mistakes or flaws caused the "overload" problem a week before the main encounter. I would think a simulator (mirror) would catch it. It seems either they didn't use a simulator, or the simulator somehow got out of sync with the real probe. I suppose fake data may take up a different amount of storage space than the real probe, and wonder if that was the cause for the difference.
Also, I wonder about the emotions of the people involved when the probe locked up 1 week from The Big Game.
Table-ized A.I.
More likely has to do with low production varient and certification. I've seen plenty of lab equipment pieces where the cost of calibration and certification testing that the actual item is up to certain quality standards will dwarf the original item cost. And getting a less common varient adds a zero to the cost easily when talking about a small production size for something with huge production setup costs.
NASA spent something like 1.2 billion dollars on a pen that can write in space when the Russians just used pencils.
No, NASA did not spend billions on a pen and neither the Russians nor NASA use pencils in space. Broken pencil leads (actually graphite) would be a hazard and not permitted on spaceflights. NASA never spent a penny on developing a pen that would work in space.
This is the advantage of a centrally-managed economy. This type of economic system is more efficient, resistant to fraud, and is much more agile than having a huge, lumbering military-industrial complex.
HAHAHAHAHAHAH.... Efficient and resistant to fraud? Best laugh I've had all day.
This is why China will eat the US's lunch in a just a few years.
Yeah, having 5X the population and low labor costs has nothing to do with China's success... [/sarcasm]
And let's be honest, a $40k processor isn't really going to drive up the price of the project very much.
Hell, 15 years ago that was the price of a Silicon Graphics Octane workstation which I had on my desk. You are quite correct that while $40K is a lot of money, it isn't really that much compared to the budgets of the projects such chips get used for. The New Horizons mission cost about $700 million if memory serves. For a project that you have to get right the first time, $40K for a proven processor is kind of a steal actually.
If you had a 40K Octane on your desk, then you had a very low-end Octane. You were probably a code monkey, right??
Nope. Used it for discrete event simulation and 3D modeling. Some VR work as well. All automotive engineering related. We also had an SGI Onyx as well as an Origin 2000 in my department as well. By the time I left that job you could get a desktop PC workstation for $6K that was faster for most tasks. I liked SGI hardware but it was ludicrously overpriced.
NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel.
workloads? l do know (I worked at JPL for six years in the late 80s and early 90s) that commercial chips were not designed to handle the harsh environment of space.
Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece.
A thing is worth exactly what someone else will pay for it. To me that processor isn't worth a hill of beans, even if NASA may have paid $40K for them. Back when I was at JPL one of the rad hardened CPUs that was available, IIRC, was the NSC 32000 – a NatSemi part that was a near clone of the Motorola 68000.
ITT: Fucking morons who clearly know nothing about space-survivable electronics, but won't let their ignorance prevent them from putting their mouths in drive.
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