Mars Rover Curiosity: Less Brainpower Than Apple's iPhone 5 256
Nerval's Lobster writes "To give the Mars Rover Curiosity the brains she needs to operate took 5 million lines of code. And while the Mars Science Laboratory team froze the code a year before the roaming laboratory landed on August 5, they kept sending software updates to the spacecraft during its 253-day, 352 million-mile flight. In its belly, Curiosity has two computers, a primary and a backup. Fun fact: Apple's iPhone 5 has more processing power than this one-eyed explorer. 'You're carrying more processing power in your pocket than Curiosity,' Ben Cichy, chief flight software engineer, told an audience at this year's MacWorld."
Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . how wasteful most commercial software packages are.
iPhone 5 is faster.. for a few minutes maybe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, the iPhone 5 may have more processing power... But I bet if you put that thing in space, the first cosmic ray that comes along will happily crash the OS. Game over.
Hardware in spaecraft has to be hardened big time against radiation. Off the shelf junk will NOT work. Just sayin'.
power use and battery life have to be deal with as (Score:4, Insightful)
power use and battery life have to be dealt with as well.
That shouldn't impress anyone. (Score:4, Insightful)
Voyager 1/2 could run about 100K instructions per second, maybe less.
It's about the objective, not raw processing power.
And this is a fine opportunity! to pour some of my bile about the miserly state in which modern software is.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, good comparison.
Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on code for a very specific purpose compared to anything else.
Not needing a foolproof UI is most of it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do they always have to refer to the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)
'You're carrying more processing power in your pocket than Curiosity,' Ben Cichy, chief flight software engineer, told an audience at this year's MacWorld.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked on government systems two decades ago that had four-decade old technology and worked great. Why? All the user interface agony was offloaded to dedicated consoles.
Case in point: which is harder to code against: a command line interface, or a full-on GUI?
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
". . . how wasteful most commercial software packages are."
That's certainly true. And the huge volume of our data, too, but mostly software. I have programs on my computer that are easily 20 times the size of entire hard drive of one of our office computers back in 1994... and that hard drive contained a complete install of Microsoft Office as well as Lotus 1-2-3 for those who didn't like Excel. With lots of room to spare. As a long-time programmer, I celebrate the increases in capability we have seen over the years, but I decry the bloated inefficiency of much of our modern software. I would go so far as to say I am dismayed by it sometimes.
Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Is there any point to this article? This seems like one of those "your desktop has more power than the space shuttle" type shits of the 90's.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you're doing it in a modern software package like C# for example, there's little to no difference at all. I could write a stopwatch app... and the gui would have a single button and a display. The console version of which would be a lot harder to write. It all depends on what you're doing. Most GUIs make it easy to write for them, and offload a lot of their load onto the GPU.
By the way, Curiosity's UI is still on earth... and on dozens of different computers at Nasa. It's kind of silly to say curiosity is only powered by this tiny processor.... that processor is just accepting and implementing commands. All the data crunching is happening back here on earth by massive banks of computers.
P.S. Apple probably paid them to say this.
Re:Just goes to show. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
... and where do you think the code to display that button came from? Not from C#, but from the .NET or Mono environment... which is... more code!