Suara.com – Despite being the most advanced machine to land on the Red Planet today, it turns out that NASA’s new Explorer, Perseverance manned by PowerPC 750, the single-core processor with six million transistors that was used on the iMac from 1998.
This is the same type of processor that NASA also used in its previous rover, Curiosity.
NASA could actually use a more sophisticated chip like an Intel Core i9-10900K CPU worth US $ 500, given the budget to make Perseverance reach 2.7 billion US dollars.
However, according to New Scientist, such sophisticated chips have the disadvantage of being damaged by environmental conditions on Mars.
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That’s because the Martian atmosphere has far less protection from harmful radiation and charged particles than Earth’s atmosphere.
A bad burst of radiation can damage the sensitive electronic devices of a modern processor and the more complex the chip, the more errors can occur.
In addition, given the vast distance Mars is so far away, NASA can’t simply swap processors if something goes wrong.
Due to these conditions, Perseverance actually has two computation modules, one of which is used as a backup just in case something goes wrong.
To make the system more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip at Perseverance is slightly different from the one used in legacy iMacs.
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Technically it is the RAD750 chip, a special variant that is resistant to radiation and costs up to 200,000 US dollars.
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