News NASA Awards $50 Million Contract for Next Space Computer

[Admin]

A lucrative contract to make spaceflight processors has gone to Microchip Technology, Inc. of Arizona.

NASA Awards $50 Million Contract for Next Space Computer : Read more

 

[Geef]

Save some money, shoot a crate of 100 of those little mini PCs off Amazon connected to a big router. A few break down? Oh well. Wait nm they still use quite a bit of power.

 

[DougMcC]

Save some money, shoot a crate of 100 of those little mini PCs off Amazon connected to a big router. A few break down? Oh well. Wait nm they still use quite a bit of power.

Funny. But i'm sure you understand that the reality is not that a few of them break down, but that 100% of them fail usually within seconds when the cold cracks the substrate.

 

[frogr]

Like how they fail when people cool w liquid nitrogen

 

[magbarn]

Wouldn't a 1 micrometer 486 be much more radiation resistant than a 3nm TSMC CPU?

 

[TheOtherOne]

I am just waiting for Weta Digital (or any other CGI studio) to work on a "live" broadcast of Mars Landing in near future!

Just imagine what they can do with the tech they have now, compared to what they did back in 60s

 

[bit_user]

Save some money, shoot a crate of 100 of those little mini PCs off Amazon connected to a big router. A few break down? Oh well. Wait nm they still use quite a bit of power.

It's not about breaking, but being incredibly fault-tolerant. I think I heard about satellite CPUs using something crazy like 4 bits of parity/ECC per 8 bits of data. That's because they need to withstand being showered with radiation, during events like solar storms.

A former boss of mine worked once told me about a CPU he worked on at an unnamed government research lab that would produce deterministic results in non-deterministic time, back in the 1990's. All of the intermediate results were error-checked, and computations would be repeated until they were error-free.

Anyway, this thing almost certainly has to work on interplanetary probes and on Mars, which means no Van Allen Belt to provide any shielding from solar and cosmic radiation.

 

[bit_user]

Wouldn't a 1 micrometer 486 be much more radiation resistant than a 3nm TSMC CPU?

Where did it say they would use TSMC 3 nm? I doubt it'll be smaller than 45 nm, but certainly not 3 nm.

Interestingly, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter uses an off-the-shelf Snapdragon 801 SoC (28 nm). I wonder how much radiation shielding it has, and how often they have to reset it. Anyway, Ingenuity was only created as an experiment, to test out the concept. It could use a commodity CPU because it wasn't central to the mission.

By contrast, the Perseverance rover has a 133 MHz PowerPC CPU made at somewhere between 250 and 150 nm. If its CPU failed, that would mean leave its mission incomplete, if not an outright failure.

 

[bit_user]

I am just waiting for Weta Digital (or any other CGI studio) to work on a "live" broadcast of Mars Landing in near future!

They don't really need to, because we have footage from some Go Pro cameras that were on board. You can watch a whole movie of the descent.

I must say: it was pretty disappointing to watch the livestream of the landing and get only the telemetry. Makes sense, but still anticlimactic.