| ▲ | zoeysmithe 3 hours ago | |
This is interesting and I googled a bunch of this. The helicopter base station is an off the shelf snapdragon 801 cpu with 4 cores. By comparision the CPU in the rover is a BAE RAD750 processor at 200hz, essentially a radiation hardened 1998 G3 imac chip. They run calculations on each snapdragon core and if there is a consensus take the value. I don't know how their voting system works. If core 1 and 2 agree and 3 and 4 don't, does it just agree with core 1 and 2's consensus if 3 and 4 don't match? Or does it was 3 minimum and re-runs the calculation. It also performs aggressive memory scrubbing. This sounds like software ECC by performing various memory checksums by comparing values to the flash drive's files. So if script.sh on disk doesn't match script.sh in memory, they know the memory is bad. I guess they are assuming flash will always be correct, which is interesting, but in space maybe its just a 'pick a lesser evil' thing because flash can also be corrupted by radiation. They store critical files with triple redundancy on the flash, so the flash sounds pretty rugged here. There is also a secondary radiation hardened flash storage 'golden image' the unprotected snapdragon's running flash can be compared to. Then the software identifies damaged memory addresses and blocks them. One example is the software found 25 corrupted bits in its 1gb memory and has marked them as unusable. I'm guessing over time more and more bits will be unusable as radiation permanently destroys those transistors. So its a bit of a race against the clock. Better to use the base station until it can't be used anymore. | ||
| ▲ | bahmboo an hour ago | parent [-] | |
I asked Gemini the parent question and got a very comprehensive answer. I didn't want to cut/paste it here because the villagers have torches. Your summation is very good and took some effort, thanks! | ||