On the morning of July 4th at 1:52am EDT a marvel of modern technology will hopefully reveal the secrets of the universe. Out in deep space we are the strangers. Our quest for the secrets of how it all began may be answered in the wee hours of the morning of the 4th of July. Good luck to all of the JPL and NASA personell.
Now to the matter at hand. To make this happen they needed the package to be simple and very very smart. You think they chose a AMD or Intel cpu to run the show? Nope guys and gals. Instead the chose a simple little old IBM cpu made in its space/milatary form for the PowerPC line of IBM computers. Ain't that something? The RAD750 is onboard the space probe headed to impact with a comet 83 million miles away at time of impact. Do you have any idea how complex the software is? It has to figure where it is and where the comet is and get there to hit it. The cpu chip has onboard inside it 48megs of ram. That's all. The program is so smart it can make all the navagation calulations and do it on its own. And that's traveling at 23,000 mph or roughly 6 miles per second. Those programmers have to pack in as much as possible to make it work. The JPL/NASA programmers write software that has instructions that go down to the kernal level.
So next time you think you're having a problem writting some code or you're building a system and things are not going well, think of how much pressure these guys were/are under to build and program something that cost 333 million US and has to survive the rigors of deep space and do the job right. Cause they don't get a second chance...
Now to the matter at hand. To make this happen they needed the package to be simple and very very smart. You think they chose a AMD or Intel cpu to run the show? Nope guys and gals. Instead the chose a simple little old IBM cpu made in its space/milatary form for the PowerPC line of IBM computers. Ain't that something? The RAD750 is onboard the space probe headed to impact with a comet 83 million miles away at time of impact. Do you have any idea how complex the software is? It has to figure where it is and where the comet is and get there to hit it. The cpu chip has onboard inside it 48megs of ram. That's all. The program is so smart it can make all the navagation calulations and do it on its own. And that's traveling at 23,000 mph or roughly 6 miles per second. Those programmers have to pack in as much as possible to make it work. The JPL/NASA programmers write software that has instructions that go down to the kernal level.
So next time you think you're having a problem writting some code or you're building a system and things are not going well, think of how much pressure these guys were/are under to build and program something that cost 333 million US and has to survive the rigors of deep space and do the job right. Cause they don't get a second chance...