The Computers Behind NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover

The Computers Behind NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover Of all the systems onboard that have furthered our understanding of the Martian landscape, none have been as critical and as overworked as curiosity’s onboard computer system. Curiosity’s entire mission relies primarily on two identical on-board rover computers, called Rover Computer Element or RCE’s. These single board computers were designed to be hardened from the extreme radiation of space, safeguarding it against power-off cycles. Each computer has 256 kilobytes of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory. They both run a safety-critical, real-time operating systems know as VxWorks. VxWorks is used heavily in the aerospace and defense industries and can be found in the avionics systems of a variety of aircraft. At the heart of the Rover Computer Elements is one of the most expensive CPU systems available, the BAE systems RAD750. Costing over a quarter million dollars per system board, the RAD750 CPU is a 10.4 million