Orion Capsule Safely Recovered, Complete With 12-Year-Old Computer Guts 197
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.
These are real engineers, you Ruby weenies. (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
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The difference is that this is the first compile and test of Orion and it costs a couple billion so don't mess up.
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That's why you don't have high school dropouts working on them in Ruby.
I'm guilty of laziness myself. I used to check code before compiling it. Today I let the compiler do the syntax checking. It's just faster, and if you take a few precautions it's not any less safe.
I would probably act differently if an error costs a few billions in shiny new hardware going poof.
Re:These are real engineers, you Ruby weenies. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually there have been a few years of tests of Orion leading up this.
Tank drop tests to see how it lands in water and how well it floats afterwards.
Parachute drops out the back of planes to test the parachutes and descent characteristics.
This is just the combined test where all the features are tested together - think of it as the first beta with the individual feature tests as being the alpha testing.
Re:These are real engineers, you Ruby weenies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank god the English language doesn't have multiple meanings for a word. It would be so awful if we were able to have multiple different types of engineers for different areas. Pretty soon even the guy who drives a train is going to want to be called an engineer.
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Pretty soon even the guy who drives a train is going to want to be called an engineer.
Only in the US. We call that guy an "Engine Driver", a "Train Driver" or even a "Motorman".
The engineer is the guy who builds trains.
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Really? Then what do you call the guy who designs them?
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Hey, don't blame the language if you abuse it to denote things that shouldn't be called by that name!
Re:These are real engineers, you Ruby weenies. (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, I do network field work as a network engineer, so I have to deal with racks and tools and the odd bit of fabrication work from time to time, so my view is undoubtedly colored by that.
My wife is an engineer, but she came to the title through her bachelors' degree.
Re:These are real engineers, you Ruby weenies. (Score:5, Informative)
OK, Maj. English, here's a direct quote from Merriam-Webster:
: a person who has scientific training and who designs and builds complicated products, machines, systems, or structures : a person who specializes in a branch of engineering
: a person who runs or is in charge of an engine in an airplane, a ship, etc.
: a person who runs a train
In its original context it meant a maker of engines, from a Latin root meaning "invent".
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What engineering field is using differential equation, which don't already have computer model, on a daily basis ?
But my computer is 12 years old!
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The back slapping on this mission... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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.
Re:The back slapping on this mission... (Score:4, Insightful)
. At least then the Saturn V launch rocket was being tested as well.
The early Apollo test missions were on a Saturn 1B
Re:The back slapping on this mission... (Score:5, Interesting)
. At least then the Saturn V launch rocket was being tested as well.
The early Apollo test missions were on a Saturn 1B
Yup. That's what I consider one of the craziest/most amazing aspects of the crazy-stuff-rich
whole Apollo program: The final Saturn V configuration (S-IC + S-II + S-IVB) had only two
unmanned test flight - in the form of full orbital missions, Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 (Apollo 4 was
also the very first flight for both S-IC and S-II). Both missions were complete successes
(and led to the discovery of lots of problems, including the famous "pogo oscillations").
There were plans for a third unmanned Saturn V launch, but they were running out of time, and
more importantly, out of Saturn Vs, so it was decided to make that launch Apollo 8 instead - the
first manned flight around the moon.
Nobody was really sure this would work...
Not a single Saturn V ever failed in a mission-critical way (Apollo 13 was a service module poblem).
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Yeah, I remember all those NASA launches where they soft-landed the first stage and reused it.
Oh, hang on, NASA talked about it a lot, but never did. The closest they got was reusing the metal shell around the SRBs, which probably cost more than it saved, since the fuel made up almost the entire cost of the SRBs.
If SpaceX is just 'taking ideas and engineering and research' from NASA, how did they manage to build a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launch them into space for less than NASA spent on p
Probably not (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Probably not (Score:5, Informative)
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 those old computers were any good, then the Voyagers would still be working. ...
Oh wait
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
Re:Probably not (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Probably not (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all cast in bullshit nonsense light. A better article would be "NASA uses 2002 designs, and here's why". The meat of the article would be "essentially, these are validated low-gate count designs that can be manufactured using modern methods, making them extremely reliable and fault tolerant, since the designs have been verified and modern lithography has an extraordinary engineering factor for such low gate counts."
Each headline lies on opposite ends of the patriotic spectrum, and it's really unfortunate that the current article lies on the "fuck nasa, it's over budget and can't do anything right" side. This is a QA mission and it was (as far as has been reported) 100% successful. It's capsule design with completely redesigned modern technology. Fuck fashion.
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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.
Not yet anyways
For Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay [nytimes.com]
Yeah and it does things your i5 cannot (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yeah and it does things your i5 cannot (Score:4, Informative)
There are people still using 8051 chips that are 20 years old because
There's more than just space engineers using 8051 chips. Texas and others like to embed some noddy little 8051 as the microcontroller into their small, low power radio chips. It ain't your grandaddy's 8051, it runs at a much higher AND much lower clock speed with single cycle instructions. Still an 8051 though.
Re:Yeah and it does things your i5 cannot (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're actually incorrect. There's enough radiation to lock up computers in low earth orbit, including on board the ISS. While there is an increased risk of cancer in the future for astronauts who spend time in that environment, it does not result in certain death.
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You're actually incorrect. There's enough radiation to lock up computers in low earth orbit, including on board the ISS.
Not really, no. They run quite a lot of unmodified, off-the shelf, near-current-generation laptops on the ISS
(most new crews bring a couple of laptops and leave most of them them there, while only broken ones are
put in the "garbage trucks"). They don't run any worse than on the ground.
True, none of those is mission-critical as in "a failure will kill the crew", but some are experiment-result-critical.
The people designing the experiments apparently are fine with that, so it can't be that bad.
Re:Yeah and it does things your i5 cannot (Score:4, Insightful)
The people designing the experiments apparently are fine with that, so it can't be that bad.
Some of the stuff is that bad, but if you have a fixed budget and you have the choice of doing a lesser experiment with more certainty that it will 100% get the data you want, vs a broader experiment with more data, a risk of failure but a crew standing by to hand-hold the problem and nurture the equipment back to life, then you typically go with the latter option.
There's a reason unmanned equipment is treated differently to manned equipment, especially aboard the ISS where you can always send up a replacement piece with the next crew.
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You'd be surprised how resilient the human body is compared to a contemporary CPU.
I'd really like to see what happens when you take an x-ray pic of a CPU while it's running.
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I'd really like to see what happens when you take an x-ray pic of a CPU while it's running.
You can! Every passenger's running phone, and some computers that are awake, are sent through the baggage scanners at every airport. Even more impressive, the computers that run them are next to the poorly built and maintained scanners all day every day.
Source for parts? (Score:2)
From my mostly uneducated point of view, the concern isn't processing capacity but having a reliable source for parts. Is anyone still making PowerPC 750FX processors? If not, what's the shelf life on them? What about the ancillary chips/hardware? Nothing lasts forever, even if it's not being used.
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BAE is still making the RAD750 [wikipedia.org]. I worked with the predecessor that is in the RAD6000 computer board.
12 years...no problem (Score:2)
it should still be able to render porn at 30fps.
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12 years old? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Radiation tolerance (Score:4, Informative)
Operating System (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like they are using an RTOS that is commonly used.
http://www.ghs.com/customers/n... [ghs.com]
Pretty cool system
Engineering == use the correct technology (Score:2)
If older computers can do the job and are known to be reliable in this environment, then using them is the correct choice. We sent people to the moon, and Voyager to multiple outer planets with much older computer technology.
If newer computers would provide improved performance IN THIS APPLICATION then they are worth considering.
The word "powerfull" is rather missleading (Score:2)
I mean seriously, every "smart"phone is now much faster than anything scientists had till the 1980s... yet since you are unable to write programs for it without the need of other computers, you cannot do anything they did.
On the other hand, if you had a "digital television set" in the 1980s, yes those existed, you had a device with much more processing power than the computer you could have on your desk. The problem was that your TV-set had it in hard wired circuits while your PC didn't even have the IO cap
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I had a couple of those, first a 35" or 45" sony, iirc and then my father in law's 55" (?) monster.
Especially on the first one, the hardware handled an insufficient number of simultaneous colors (think back to 8 bit video cards).
So watching football, most of the colors would get used on the first couple of lines. After that, it needed to use the nearest available green for any more it hit. So I would end up with huge lines separating patches of monochromatic green, looking like a video game rather than a
What to wonder about? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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That being said it should be mentioned that a variant of TFTP (35years old) is the standard for Loading SW onto parts in Planes.
I've had to buy up old Win95 Toughbooks for our engineers so they can load the cabin lighting into a Boeing 747. There's a place in the plane that takes a 3.5" floppy with the settings. The only program that writes that disk needs to run on Win98 or below and won't work with a USB floppy. Just bought three more that came out of cop cars in Iowa.
The changing face of COCOMO (Score:2)
This makes me wonder what the development process is like in non-commercial environments versus commercials ones. COCOMO is supposed to let you estimate the time and costs of a project but that hinges on your estimation of the number of lines of code. The model also assumes that the average programmer can create a certain number of lines of code per day. Seems to me that this pace is MUCH slower in aerospace than it is at Google or Facebook. So perhaps COCOMO needs to be revised with an industry factor.
Not as bad as it sounds. (Score:2)
I have been in computers since the very early 80's starting with an Apple II. From then to about 2008 I have aquired or upgraded my computer about every 3 years or less. I am currently using a machine that is over 8 years old. Quad core Dell Precision 390. Still performs well enough to play modern game titles like Mech Warrior online. At no previous time could I say I would be satisfied using an 8 year old computer. Moores law has slowed to a crawl compared to what it was doing in the 90's. So a 12 years ol
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It's true that my system has been somewhat upgraded. The GPU is faster than anything I could have gotten in 2006 (maybe twice the speed). Still that a basic system could still be viable after 8 years is unprecidented. I would have been nuts to be using a computer built in 1986 (386 16MHz) in 1994 (486 100MHz) or a system bult in 1996 (Pentium 133MHz) in 2004 (2.4GHz P4). These improvements have been on the order of 10X or more over 8 years. Performance gains since then have maybe been double, a big slowdown
My home server is even older (Score:2)
Sure I've added a Sata card and a GB Ethernet a while back and it's got 6 TB in a software raid.
But it's a server, why would a server ever need more processor, all it does is read/write stuff between Ethernet and disk. I'll keep running it until it finally dies.
Perfectly suited for the task (Score:3)
There are only a handful of space qualified microprocessors available. Most of them were designed 20+ years ago. In fact this is the case for most space qualified ICs of all types. Nothing that goes into space with the expectation of high reliability uses modern high speed circuitry because smaller features result in greater error rates and a shorter operational lifetime due to radiation effects. It is also cost prohibitive to develop a modern fab line to manufacture space grade parts so the industry is mostly stuck in the past using older designs largely due to reliability requirements.
The Java set despairs that they can't play in their perfect abstraction of a machine without gobs of memory and CPU cycles to blow away. People who know how to program bare metal can get by perfectly fine on a "slow" memory constrained device.
All embedded tech is like that (Score:2)
It has to be fast enough to do a specific list of tasks, but any extra speed is useless and the tasks may not change for decades. Any investment in extra speed detracts from what could be gained in reliability, temperature range, power efficiency and cost. There are also plenty of cases where consumer devices don't have to be any different from a decade ago, except that you have been brainwashed by heavy marketing and hastily written inefficient software.
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"so what"??
"stupid canon shell"??
sheesh..
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i'll bet you can fart "happy birthday" which is even more impressive..
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it makes me feel very very impressed.
why bother flying spacecraft when you can fart your way into world fame?
oh, and, of course, be sure to poop on everyone who can't fart quite as eloquently as your impassive self :-)
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Wait, when did the F-14 maneuver without a pilot?
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Maneuvering for orbital rendezvous is one of the most difficult things a pilot can do.
That is all fine and well, but you generally have lots of time in the orbit. And the flight dynamics itself can be evaluated at fairly long intervals. No atmosphere. No potentially turbulent airflow over lift and control surfaces. As far as I know, Apollo worked just fine with control loops evaluated with a 10 Hz frequency or something like that.
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Re: So fucking what? (Score:2)
Methinks you're just sore because Orion made it back.
clock speeds yes (Score:5, Informative)
The clock speed is the same but I guarantee even the lowest end AMD would destroy anything 12 years old in terms of work.
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Don't underestimate the power difference from top to bottom. Anandtech's CPU bench doesn't go all the way back to 2002, so the closest I got to the Pentium 4 HT 3.06 launched back then is a Pentium 4 660 from Q1 2005 vs AMD Sempron 2650 launched in april 2014. Hey, you said weakest AMD processor. Results [anandtech.com]
Cinebench R10 - Single Threaded Benchmark:
P4 660: 2245
Sempron 2650: 1384
Subtract 15% from the P4's score to match a 3.06 GHz P4 and you're down to 1908. Then you have the arch differences from Northwood to P
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That sound you just heard was caused by a joke flying over your head.
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Re:clock speeds yes (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Sometimes you have to spend money to maintain the status quo.
My 15 year old computer running Windows 98 is still as fast now as it was then, but Windows 98 being horrendously obsolete is not suitable now for tasks which it used to be. Try surfing the internet on a horrendously outdated browser, or just try opening up the Slashdot page and wait for the javascript to finish processing. Then there's the attack vector. To remain secure you can't run old outdated software so you must upgrade the software and tha
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windows 98 is so old that soon it may be immune to malware.
Re:clock speeds yes (Score:4, Funny)
When Vista came out, I saw a claim a few times here and there. "The best thing about Vista is the viruses have compatibility issues."
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Spending money because something is advertised as new is foolish without determining if one will actually benefit from that new thing.
Hmmm. If everybody adopted your approach, the world economy would collapse. Capitalism doesn't work in a rational market space, which is what you would create if everybody actually considered the value of an item, and not just its price, before acquiring it. Fortunately for our global economy, hardly anybody understands the difference between value and price. As long as businesses can continue to successfully exploit that ignorance, the global economy will survive.
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One will pay one way or the other. Lets compare the cost of a free crt monitor to that of a $150 lcd. The crt will use more electricity to use so it will cost the $150 or more in just a couple of years unless one uses it an average of less than an hour a day. I use my computers a lot more than the average person since I do volunteer work for World Community Grid but a 6 core computer at a given speed will easily outdo 12 single core computers. I have run a 4 core computer now for more than 6 years and a
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At work we bought 160GB drives until they were
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It's a dual core processor, I can hit facebook, web, Echolink, Navigation, 5MP camera, etc. It is limited to a max of a 32GB SD card though.
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I still have a computer that's 12 years old with a 3 GHz processor. It's not slower than a laptop today, because processor speeds plateaued 12 years ago.
Are you forgetting the fabrication size? For example a 130nm [wikipedia.org] CPU clocked at 3 GHz will be much much slower than a 14nm [wikipedia.org] CPU clocked at the same 3 GHz frequency and it will be a lot cooler too. The reason for this is because the transistors in the CPU are much closer therefore there is less resistance [wikipedia.org] (and consequently less heat [wikipedia.org]) for the electricity traveling between them.
Re:ancient in tech years? (Score:4, Informative)
Cooler, yes, Faster, no. Clock speed compared to process size has NOTHING to do with "fast" vs "slow".
Process may allow higher clock speed, as well as many other advantages (fitting multiple cores, larger caches, etc on one die) - but without any other innovation the SAME architecture at the SAME clock speed with ANY process size will give you the same performance....
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SPEEDS have.
POWER has not.
Just to abuse a car analogy, you can go 20 or 100 with 3000 rpm, it all depends on the gear you're in.
Space X Redundant Computing (Score:3)
There are two approaches to radiation tolerant computing. One is to make the processors hardened to radiation. These processors are usually slower, and use an architecture with fewer knowledgable computer programmers. This seems to be the approach on Orion.
In contrast, the Space X Dragon Capsule uses multiple processors operating simultaneously to create a fault tolerant system [wikipedia.org]. To quote:
Dragon uses a "radiation-tolerant" design in the electronic hardware and software that make up its flight computers. The system uses three pairs of computers, each constantly checking on the others, to instantiate a fault-tolerant design. In the event of a radiation upset or soft error, one of the computer pairs will perform a soft reboot.[45] Including the six computers that make up the main flight computers, Dragon employs a total of 18 triple-processor computers.[45]
An advantage of this is that the processors are far faster. There are also many more trained programmers availabl
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Re:Herp a derp fast computers DEEERRRPPP (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Herp a derp fast computers DEEERRRPPP (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Herp a derp fast computers DEEERRRPPP (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Well, I'd never even heard of the 1802 until now. Interesting articles on it.
What makes it awful? It seems quite slow, but the switchable program counter and IO options do sound rather interesting. I'm just goig on what I read online though. I'd rather get the opinion of someone who's actually used one.
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I built a wire-wrapped computer around an 1802. 2k of memory. Lots of fun. One advantage was that there was a chip that mapped the available memory to a video signal so it was very easy to get a TV display going. And it didn't require any particular clock frequency so you could actually single-step it very easily. I don't recall much about the instruction set, but I don't think it was particularly awful.
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Hey... you insensitive clod...
One of the first computers I built (actually the 3rd) was a hand wire-wrapped 1802. Cutting edge CMOS for it's day.
Back then, it was anything but "awful".
Get off my lawn!
iMac G3 like technology ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Herp a derp fast computers DEEERRRPPP (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Herp a derp fast computers DEEERRRPPP (Score:5, Interesting)
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Don't laugh (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [amazon.com]. 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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
If you're saying 'use these toys as a gateway to get them interested in REAL electronics' then I'm all for that. BUT: What I see all the time is a total lack of understanding or even interest in the underlying hardware that makes the toys work that they're playing with. They scoff at anything using discrete components, but are completely lost when it comes to something as simple as using a MOSFET as a power switch for something that requires more than a microcontrollers' GPIO pins can handle alone.
Oh, and
Re: (Score:2)
Link please? There are several sites linked to in the summary, and on spot checking them I didn't see any actual in-flight pictures.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The CGI on the Control Room board was a "display" of what the craft was doing at the time. When the craft fired the thruster the CGI showed it. It was used on parts of the mission where there was no live feed from the craft to see what was going on. In some NASA TV feeds the CGI craft was a little out of sync with the real one; but you chould see/hear that it was doing the same thing as the craft.
GO NASA!
Re: (Score:3)
That's what people have the disconnect on. Flight control software isn't stressing. It's maybe a dozen or two 6x6 matrix-vector operations which unroll into maybe a few hundred FLOPS (or they could be fixed point) that need to run maybe at 20 or 30 Hz (Apollo's major cycle was 10 Hz). This is stuff you could do with hand-wired 7400 IC's if you really wanted to (in fact they did the equivalent for
Re:12 year-old computers, big deal! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
I learned wire-wrapping about 12 years ago in university courses. Prior to that, I would have assumed it was obsolete tech, but there were some very wise and experienced professors. It is much faster and cleaner than soldering. I still use it when debugging boards and I need a quick test lead attached to a pin header. Solder would ruin the connector, but wire-wrap is removable.