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October 15, 2015 04:00 pm
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/x79wFaB-mYw/looking-at-the-hardware-and-software-of-nasas-new-horizons
Looking At the Hardware and Software of NASA's New Horizons
alexvoica writes: Last week we learnt that Pluto has blue skies and ice water thanks to a series of high-resolution images provided by the New Horizons probe. But how is the probe taking these photographs and sending them back to NASA? What hardware and software systems are inside and who built them? Luckily, the New Horizons engineering team kindly answered these questions (and many others) in a detailed interview. Here are some fun facts from my discussion with the engineers. The chipset: It might sound strange to some but NASA used to be a chip maker. Before using standard MIPS or Intel CPUs for probes like New Horizons, NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel. Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece and built using a grant from the Goddard Space Flight Center. The camera: New Horizons has a multispectral 1 megapixel camera; sending a single 1200 x 900 image back to earth takes approximately 3-4 hours. The comms: Forget 4G LTE, New Horizons uses the very best! The probe relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls. DSN is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecom system in the world and was also used to guide the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission back to earth. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon remain forever grateful. The memory: New Horizons includes 16GB of flash memory which provides plenty of storage space for photos and other scientific data. The operating system: New Horizons runs on Nucleus, a popular operating system designed by Mentor Graphics. Coincidentally, Nucleus is also at the heart of the ARTIK 1 platform for IoT launched by Samsung only a few months ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/x79wFaB-mYw/looking-at-the-hardware-and-software-of-nasas-new-horizons
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