When you want to send a robot to explore another planet, you need to equip it with the latest and greatest technologies available and developed to increase its capabilities to the fullest. This is wisdom and logic, but it seems that the US space agency, NASA, followed the ancient Egyptian proverb that says "fat is in the old."
What's the story
NASA's Perseverance spacecraft landed on the surface of the Red Planet last month, and you can imagine that this NASA rover, which is the most advanced vehicle ever, succeeded in landing on Mars that no human has yet reached using a modified PowerPC 750 processor. The same processor that was running on the famous iMac G3, which Apple launched in 1998! It was a joint manufacture between IBM and Motorola at the time.
Why
The question that currently comes to our minds is why NASA is providing the mobile robot - which is its latest machine, which was sent in a project costing 2.7 billion dollars - with a single-core CPU that is more than two decades old and runs at 233 MHz with only 6 million transistors? Can't you buy an Intel processor? For $ 500 to get a speed of 5.3 GHz, or maybe use Apple's M1 chip, which includes 16 billion transistors and operates at a speed of 3.2 GHz (the flight was launched before Apple unveiled the M1, but we explain here as a technical example).
The answer is simply because the advanced chip cannot withstand the unique operating conditions in the red planet, as the Martian atmosphere provides much less protection against harmful radiation and charged particles compared to the Earth's atmosphere and the harmful radiation explosion can destroy the sensitive electronics inside the modern processor and whenever the chip is The more complex the damage, the faster.
That is why NASA relied on the PowerPC 750 processor in the Apple iMac G3, but it modified it by strengthening the RAD750 variant, which is a platform that works against radiation, so that the processor can withstand between 200 thousand to 1 million rad (radiation measurement unit) and temperatures up to 125 degrees Celsius.
Finally, NASA relies on the processor of the old iMac because it trusts its ability to work in those exceptional circumstances, and because the flight to an unknown planet is 223 million km away, there is no room for even a slight error.
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