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New Horizons is only about 33 AU from the sun. Voyager 1 is currently 133 AU from the sun, and is leaving faster than New Horizons; however I am not sure what o
by gizmo686 11y ago
New Horizons is only about 33 AU from the sun. Voyager 1 is currently 133 AU from the sun, and is leaving faster than New Horizons; however I am not sure what os voyager is using.
- akiselev 11y agoVoyager spacecraft do not use any operating system. Due to the highly custom CPUs in Voyager, writing a compiler to build a 1970s era OS for the architecture would have been extremely risky and inefficient. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that the cultural restrictions on operating systems relaxed enough for some missions to start using them, and often times they are used for simple features like task scheduling and memory management because the vendors have already put the time into testing their implementations (which are well tested for other aerospace, telecom, medical, and automotive applications). Until about 20 years ago, the complexity of the hardware didn't really necessitate off the shelf OSs anyway, and often times the overhead cost was too much to be practical anyway.