IBM RAD6000

The RAD6000 radiation-hardened single board computer, based on the IBM RISC Single Chip CPU, was manufactured by IBM Federal Systems. IBM Federal Systems was sold to Loral, later sold to Lockheed Martin and currently a part of BAE Systems. It is mainly known as the onboard computer of numerous NASA spacecraft.

The radiation-hardening of the original RSC 1.1 million-transistor processor to make the RAD6000's CPU was done by IBM Federal Systems Division working with the Air Force Research Laboratory.

As of June, 2008, there are 200 RAD6000 processors in space on a variety of NASA, United States Department of Defense and commercial spacecraft, including:
* the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers
* the Mars Pathfinder lander
* the Deep Space 1 probe
* the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter
* the Mars Odyssey orbiter
* the Spitzer Infrared Telescope Facility
* the MESSENGER probe to Mercury
* the STEREO Spacecraft
* the IMAGE/Explorer 78 MIDEX spacecraft
* the Genesis and Stardust sample return missions
* the Phoenix Mars Polar Lander
* the DAWN Mission to the asteroid belt using ion propulsion

The computer has a maximum clock rate of 33 MHz and a processing speed of about 35 MIPS. In addition to the CPU itself, the RAD6000 has 128 MB of ECC RAM. A typical real-time operating system running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorks. The Flight boards in the above systems have switchable clock rates; divide by 2, 4, or 8, giving the 20MHz RSCVME effective rates of 2.5, 5, 10, or 20 MHz.

Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996.

The RAD6000's successor is the RAD750 processor, based on IBM's PowerPC 750, and is used in NASA's Mars probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and seven RAD750's are used onboard the recently launched NASA GammaRay Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). The RAD750 was also selected as mission computer for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, GOES-R and Advanced EHF, (the DoD communications satellite) as well as numerous other satellites.

External links

* [http://www.securityfocus.net/news/7894 Software on Mars rovers 'space qualified'] – By Matthew Fordahl/AP, 23 January 2004
* [http://www.kirtland.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-070404-100.pdf AFRL Rad6000 fact sheet]
* [http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/the-software-behind-the-mars-p.html Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander (Audio Interview)]