Hello STS 361 ( and the world... ) ! My name is Steve Canfield, and I'm a Computer Science major at the University of Puget Sound. This semester I am going to explore the issue of computing on the red planet. Much of computing as we know it relies on our relatively safe planet to work, and here on Earth "mission critical" systems are built with redundancy and can be inspected when things fail. In going to Mars, redundancy is limited and if one wishes to inspect the onboard software it must do so through that software.
So far I have found information on the computing systems on "Spirit" and "Opportunity". Each rover sports a RAD6000 microprocessor running at 33MHz, about 1/7 of today's average PC speeds. The RAD6000 is radiation shielded because radiation is a huge problem in space; even on Earth we occasionally see bits randomly flip themselves. The operating system running this whole show is called VxWorks, a "real-time" OS manufactured in Alameda, CA. A Real time operating system is one that completes each task in a known amount of time. This means that the running time of various procedures is bounded. Many home routers actually use the same VxWorks OS, and in my experience it's a little buggy. No wonder we lost Spirit for 16 days back when it landed on the planet. The Mars rovers each have 128 MB of memory, based on the theory that they will be chugging through lots of data.
Check in soon and we'll discuss the amazing computational facilities of the Phoenix lander and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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