RAD6000

The RAD6000 radiation-hardened single board computer, based on the IBM POWER CPU, is manufactured by BAE Systems and is mainly known as the on-board computer of numerous NASA spacecraft. Its instruction set is similar to early members of the PowerPC processor family. The radiation-hardening of the original POWER 1.1 million-transistor processor to make the RAD6000's CPU was done by IBM Federal Systems (now part of BAE SYSTEMS) working with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The processor is/was used in the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, the Mars Pathfinder lander, the Deep Space 1 probe, the Mars Polar Lander, the Mars Odyssey orbiter, and the Spitzer Infrared Telescope Facility, as well as 77 satellites, as of 2003. A RAD6000 computer is reported to cost between US$200,000 and US$300,000. The computer has a maximum clock rate of 25MHz. In addition to the CPU itself, the RAD6000 has 128MB of error-detecting-and-correcting RAM. A typical RTOS running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorks.

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\n*Software on Mars rovers 'space qualified'   By Matthew Fordahl, The Associated Press, 23 January 2004 Category:IBM hardware