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The Last POWER1 CPU on Mars Is Dead
- d33 8y agoSo, in other words, the machine's still alive, but has no backup CPU?
- anyfoo 8y agoThe linked AP article does not indicate that a failure of the CPU is the issue here (it does not indicate much beyond this vague sentence: "its internal clock possibly so scrambled that it no longer knew when to sleep or wake up to receive commands"). What do you mean with "alive", that it still has power?
- merubin75 8y ago"Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault. The team is continuing to listen for the rover over a broad range of times, frequencies and polarizations using the Deep Space Network (DSN) Radio Science Receiver. The team has begun mission clock fault recovery commanding 'in the blind,' in the hopes of catching the rover during an awake period, as their strategy of last resort." Source: NASA mission update for sols 5340-5346 (Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 2019) https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover-status/opportunity/recent/all/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover-status/opportunity/r...
- saagarjha 8y agoThere are still Power chips (based on PowerPC 750) on Curiosity; it's just POWER1 that's dead: > That's not the end of Power ISA chips on Mars, though: Curiosity, which is running a pair of RAD750s (one main and one backup, plus two SPARC accessory CPUs), is still in operation at 2,319 Mars solar days and ticking.
- Aardwolf 8y ago> it's just POWER1 that's dead Is it certain that the chip is not still getting some power and running something?
- bdamm 8y agoKind of a Schrödinger's cat problem, is it not? For all purposes it is dead to us.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoDo POWER1 cpus dream of martian electronic sheep?
- yingw787 8y agoMight be O/T, but I found it really interesting how they mention "5,352 Martian solar days". Do we humans have plans in the pipeline for a universal time standard we can use wherever we are? Something that is a little more useful than "seconds since UNIX epoch" but something a little less terrestrial than UTC? Or is time going to be based wherever we land or travel (e.g. divide up Mars into time zones upon colonization)? If we don't have a formal ISO solution, it might be a good idea to start pinning one down; might be relevant by the time the standard is finalized.
- givinguflac 8y agoAgreed, I’d like it to be called “star date” like Star Trek but with fewer numbers involved.
- bch 8y agoTcl is ready for it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1024711/hidden-features-of-tcl-tk#comment838620_1026619 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1024711/hidden-features-...
- scott_s 8y agoI was disappointed to recently learn that star dates were basically arbitrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate
- dahfizz 8y agoI don't really see the problem with standardizing on 'seconds since the epoch' for any interplanetary communication and having clients convert to something more meaningful to humans. Any other "universal" time format will be just as meaningless when days and seasons are all different lengths.
- tomp 8y agoYeah I don't entirely understand why we don't that already... Like, websites should be sending UNIX time to clients, and then the browser should display it in users local timezone/format.
- starpilot 8y agoGoodnight, sweet prince.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ddtaylor 8y agoAre these powered by battery or solar, or both?
- centizen 8y agoThe rovers would only receive about 4 hours of sunlight in a day, so Li-Ion batteries are used to store enough charge to keep it running reliably. Newer rovers like curiosity are using radioisotope generators which should last a much longer time.
- inamberclad 8y agoDo people have a particular attachment to the power architecture?
- ajdlinux 8y agoThere's still a reasonable PPC Mac/Amiga hobbyist community, many of whom will tell you about how much purer PowerPC is compared to the evil ugly x86. As someone who does PPC Linux kernel work the pragmatic part of me would like to drop support for a lot of these older machines, but as long as the machines are still actively used the support gets maintained.
- djsumdog 8y agoThere are newer PPCs as well, like the Talon motherboards.
- ajdlinux 8y agoIndeed - the Talos machines are the first new PPC desktops in quite a while. The IBM POWER CPU series is far from dead, just post-Macintosh / PS3/Wii/XB360 consoles, it's not really something you see in the consumer space any more - apart from Talos, which I'm pretty excited about. (Disclosure: I work for IBM.)
- snvzz 8y agoSadly too expensive for anybody to bother.
- segfaultbuserr 8y agoCurrently there's an ongoing project to create a free and open PowerPC laptop based on NXP T2080 for non-x86 hobbyists. I've donated for this project. https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/
- kev009 8y agoYes, it is the best commercially viable ISA on the market for servers.
- daniel_iversen 8y agoWhy does it have SPARC architecture CPUs as well I wonder? Any guesses?
- masklinn 8y agoIt's unclear whether you're asking why they have both SPARC and PPC chips, or what the SPARCs are used for. For the former, different contractors for the features, with some contractors preferring RHPPC and other RHSPARC? For the latter, one SPARCs controlled the thrusters and descent stage, the other controls the movement (it's the main chip of the motor controller).
- Thermolabile 8y agoI like to think of those more recent PPC Mars machines as Nintendo GameCubes with robotic arms and eyes. Same G3 processor family, afterall. Well, at least they should be able to browse the web with the G3 version of TenFourFox. ;)