Spirit runs on PowerPC


NASA has posted a .pdf file (MacNN pass through) detailing what under the hood of its Mars rovers, including the Spirit rover now preparing to make its first foray on the red planet.

Here's a quick quote from page 45:

"The computer in each Mars Exploration Rover runs with a 32-bit Rad 6000 microprocessor, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip used in some models of Macintosh computers, operating at a speed of 20 million instructions per second. Onboard memory includes 128 megabytes of random access memory, augmented by 256 megabytes of flash memory and smaller amounts of other non-volatile memory, which allows the system to retain data even without power."

On Mars time...

In related news, NASA has released Mars 24, a cross-platform Java program and browser applet that displays a Mars "sunclock," a graphical representation of Mars showing the current sun- and nightsides of the planet, along with a numerical readout of the time in 24-hour format. Other displays include a plot showing the relative orbital positions of Mars and Earth and a diagram showing the solar angle for a given location on Mars.

The screencaps on the download page for this nifty little widget were all grabbed from a Mac running OS X.

Editor's note: Vicarious thrills and chills for the "rest of us." And, yes, we already knew we are cool.