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MIPS goes to PlutoWith Imagination Blog - Alexandru VoicaJan. 15, 2015 |
This week we found out that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent on a mission to reach Pluto in 2006 came out of hibernation for its long-awaited encounter with the world’s most famous dwarf planet.
Traveling across the solar system, the New Horizons spacecraft is now approximately 3.5 billion miles from the Sun, nine years after its launch.
The probe carries American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh‘s ashes (he discovered Pluto in 1930) and has been navigating the solar system using two computer systems: one is used for command and data handling while the other handles guidance and control. For safety reasons, each of the two systems is duplicated, leading to a total of four on-board processors.
One small step for technology, one giant leap for CPUs
The CPU of choice for New Horizons is a MIPS-based Mongoose-V chip clocked at a whopping 12 MHz. Mongoose-V is a radiation-hardened version of the MIPS R3000 CPU and is manufactured by Synova, a Florida-based company that specializes in turnkey aeronautics solutions.
