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curiosity

NASA'south Curiosity rover has already long outlived its minimum projected lifespan with more than vi Globe years — more than than 2,000 Martian days or "Sols." However, NASA has announced that it recently had to make use of the rover's calculator redundancy to keep the mission going. Curiosity has flipped over to its fill-in computer system subsequently the principal system started experiencing errors last calendar month.

Many NASA spacecraft and surface missions take redundant systems built-in. One time they've launched from Globe, in that location'southward no way to repair damage to critical systems, then information technology makes sense to double-up on the vital components. That includes Marvel's computers, which were designed specifically for the harsh environs on Mars.

The rover has a pair of identical brains running a v-watt RAD750 CPU. This chip is part of the PowerPC 750 family, but it has been custom designed to survive loftier-radiation environments as y'all'd find on Mars or in deep space. These radiation-hardened CPUs price $200,000 each, and NASA equipped the rover with 2 of them. Each calculator too has 256 kB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of wink retention. They run identical VxWorks real-time operating systems.

When Curiosity landed on Mars in 2022, information technology used the "Side-A" computer. Nonetheless, simply a year later on in 2022 (Sol 200), the reckoner failed due to corrupted memory. The rover got stuck in a bootloop, which prevented information technology from processing commands and drained the batteries. NASA executed a swap to Side-B so engineers could perform remote diagnostics on Side-A. In the post-obit months, NASA confirmed that part of Side-A'south retentiveness was unusable and quarantined it. They kept Curiosity on Side-B, though.

The RAD750 radiation hardened computer, as found in Curiosity and other spacecraft

Several weeks ago, Side-B began experiencing problems that prevented the rover from storing key science and engineering data. The team spent a week evaluating Side-A and preparing it for the swap. NASA has at present switched Marvel dorsum to Side-A while information technology investigates the problem in greater detail, which it can only do when the other computer is active. Side-A even so has damaged retentivity from 2022, just the computer won't utilize those blocks.

NASA hasn't said how much of Side-A's RAM is bad, and information technology but had 256MB to first, but the squad does intend to move Curiosity operations back to Side-B if possible. For now, the mission is functioning normally on Side-A. There is no firsthand need to switch dorsum, merely NASA would adopt to utilize the larger memory capacity on Side-B.

At present read: Marvel Rover Begins Its 7th Yr on Mars All the same Going Strong, NASA's 2022 Mars Rover Will Have 23 Cameras, and Marvel Information Suggests Ancient Martian Lake Could Have Harbored Life