RAD6000
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The RAD6000 radiation-hardened single board computer, based on the IBM POWER CPU, is manufactured by BAE Systems and is mainly known as the onboard computer of numerous NASA spacecraft. Its instruction set is similar to early members of the PowerPC processor family.
The radiation-hardening of the original POWER 1.1 million-transistor processor to make the RAD6000's CPU was done by IBM Federal Systems (now a part of BAE SYSTEMS) working with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. In addition to 77 satellites (as of 2003), the processor is/was used in:
- the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers
- the Mars Pathfinder lander
- the Deep Space 1 probe
- the Mars Polar Lander
- the Mars Odyssey orbiter
- the Spitzer Infrared Telescope Facility
- the MESSENGER probe to Mercury
The computer has a maximum clock rate of 33 MHz and a processing speed of about 35 MIPS. In addition to the CPU itself, the RAD6000 has 128 MB of error-detecting-and-correcting RAM. A typical RTOS running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorks.
Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996.
The RAD6000's successor is the RAD750 processor, based on Motorola/Freescale's PowerPC 750.
External links
- Software on Mars rovers 'space qualified' (http://www.securityfocus.net/news/7894) – By Matthew Fordahl/AP, 23 January 2004