RAD6000

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The RAD6000 radiation-hardened single board computer, based on the IBM RISC Single Chip CPU, It was manufactured by IBM's Microelectronics division and is mainly known as the onboard computer of numerous NASA spacecraft. Its instruction set predates the AIM alliance yet it is similar to early members of the PowerPC processor family.

The radiation-hardening of the original RSC 1.1 million-transistor processor to make the RAD6000's CPU was done by IBM's Microelectronics division for IBM's Federal Systems division (now a part of BAE Systems) working with the The Air Force Research Labs. In addition to 77 satellites (as of 2003), the processor is/was used in:

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[1] (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) Spacecraft
the IMAGE/Explorer 78 MIDEX spacecraft
the Genesis and Stardust sample return missions

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 error-detecting-and-correcting RAM. A typical RTOS running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorks. The Flight boards in the above systems have switchable clock 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 latest Mars probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.