AhTim.com

Last month, the Phoenix Lander has been reached Mars planet successfully and safely. The Phoenix Lander is not autonomous, it needs to be told what to do, when to do and how to do by scientists. Hence, a computer must be able to do what it received.

So, Do you know what computer specs that NASA use in Phoenix Lander to travel from Earth to Mars and execute its missions there? The computer specs might surprise you! At least it surprise me too.

NASA Computer Specs

CPU type: RISC built by IBM

CPU Speed: 33Mhz, equivalent to very old age i386 CPU!

RAM: 128MB

Operating System: a variant of Linux called VxWorks.

Amazingly, a 33Mhz CPU computer able to control a space lander to reach Mars planet successfully! For sure, this CPU speed could not run a resources hunger Window Vista or even Windows 98.

The Operating System

Fortunately, they did not install Windows 3.11 inside. If not, it is pretty difficult to reach out to Mars and press Ctrl+Alt+Del just to reboot the lander after Windows hung at the blue screen.

According to NASA, the VxWorks OS is an embedded operating system in chip. In the event of a serious problem VxWorks will reboot into a ’safe mode’, and wait for the controllers on earth to reactivate it, or send a patch for the problem. It is intelligent, isn’t it?

The Phoenix Lander

Do you think your AMD or Core2duo 2.0+ Ghz CPU with Windows XP or Vista able to reach out of this Galaxy?

[source: Linux Blog Online]

Popularity: 38% [?]

Tags: linux mars, nasa computer, vxworks