3 ms·

It must be unbearably frustrating building this stuff to work around the limitations of 10+ year-old technologies when the superior tech inside even the phone i

• mturmon 14y ago
  Almost all of the radiation effects appear to be single event upsets (SEUs). So in principle, it should be possible to design robust software to detect and recover from faults (SEUs do no permanent damage to hardware). There have been efforts within NASA to design robust OS extensions -- redundancy, watchdogs, heartbeats, checkpoints, etc. -- so that fast/cheap COTS hardware could be used, at least for some functions like image processing. This has never reached critical mass and been carried to completion, however. So yes, as you guessed, there is significant pain and heartburn that computational capabilities are so far behind. Engineers have to spend a lot of time and cleverness squeezing, say, stereo vision processing, or image compression, into the hardware available.