ExoMars Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4180840.stm

Europe has fixed on a concept for its next mission to land on the Red Planet.

It aims to send a single robot rover to the Martian surface along with another, stationary, science package.

[djellison]

Of course, with custom realtime OS's - the processing overheads for your average spacecraft are only a fraction of those for the OS's used by those 'mainstream' processors. I've not actually heard of computing performance being a limiting factor for spacecraft - but I may have missed such reports.

Doug

[mcaplinger]

I've not actually heard of computing performance being a limiting factor for spacecraft - but I may have missed such reports.

Generally, Doug is right. There's a lot of semi-informed speculation on this thread, less real info. The RAD750's performance is comparatively poor from two factors: first, the process changes that make its internal registers immune from radiation-induced bit flips slow down the clock speed considerably, but more importantly, external components, also rad-hard, are running more slowly, as are the busses. The RAD750 on MRO doesn't even have an L2 cache and it's using a 33-MHz PCI bus.

If you wanted a non-mission-critical computing resource that didn't have to be totally bulletproof against radiation, there are many options, including commercial processors that happen to be latchup-immune and various gate arrays. For our MSL instruments we are using Xilinx FPGAs; clocked at 40 MHz they are many times faster at doing JPEG compression than code running on a fast desktop system would be.

Rover speed is typically limited more by the capabilities of the drivetrain and the overall power budget. It's not like MER would be going 50 KPH with a faster processor. Despite what AI people will try to tell you, we don't know how to write autonomous nav software regardless of how fast our processors are.

And finally, MIPS (aka "Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed") is a bad metric for judging computer performance in this or any other problem domain.

[RNeuhaus]

Rover speed is typically limited more by the capabilities of the drivetrain and the overall power budget. It's not like MER would be going 50 KPH with a faster processor. Despite what AI people will try to tell you, we don't know how to write autonomous nav software regardless of how fast our processors are.

And finally, MIPS (aka "Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed") is a bad metric for judging computer performance in this or any other problem domain.

I was thinking that too. The AI is one of the software components which needs a fast CPU, lots of RAM in order to perform the harzard avoidance analyze more sophisticated and perform the required action with a much better performance as the MER does. A much improved AI will need much less from Earth remote direction and hence the rover will have greater autonomy to perform the core activities more productively in Mars.

It is true that the MIPS "Millions Instructions per Second" is an old comparision computing power that actualy is obsolete except it is only good to have an idea about how the younger brother computer is improved against the older brother if the model or serie is about the same.

Well, I seems like that the AI is a new field that must work harder to improve the space exploration by improving the autonomy capabiltity of probe or rover. If the microprocessor RAD750 is limited in its computing capability, so why don't put more microprocessors in parallel. The most powerfull computers work with many processors in parallel.

In few words, I think the AI is still very new and I speculate that in the future, the AI will play with a much greater importance. Imaginate that JPL tell the rover: "Please go there, over that dark spot and tell me what is that up?

Rodolfo