IBM RAD6000

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The RAD6000 radiation-hardened single board computer, based on the IBM RISC Single Chip CPU, was manufactured by IBM for BAE Systems and 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 for Loral Federal Systems (now a part of BAE Systems) working with the Air Force Research Laboratory. 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 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 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.

[edit] External links

• Software on Mars rovers 'space qualified' – By Matthew Fordahl/AP, 23 January 2004
• AFRL Rad6000 fact sheet