Thursday, March 17, 2005
Spirit gets a dusting!
A wandering dust devil gave the Mars rover Spirit a nice cleaning, allowing its solar panels to juice up much mroe efficiently. Interestingly, something similar happened to Opportunity a little while back. Both Rovers are still fully active after more than a year on Mars, chugging along beyond four times their planned life span!
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2 comments:
NASA must not have use Micro$oft for the OS.
In fact, the Rovers use processors used in Macs:
RAD6000 microprocessors are radiation-hardened versions of the PowerPC chips that powered Macintosh computers in the early 1990s, with 128 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second. A critical feature of the spaceworthy chips -- developed jointly by BAE systems, JPL and the Air Force Research Laboratory -- is the radiation shielding, which uses a series of resistors and capacitors to ground harmful radiation before it can damage onboard electronics.
The software is a custom version of Unix I think... The Brains of NASA's Red Planet Rovers.
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