It is often said that our mobile phones are far more powerful than the computers used to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969. In fairness, that’s to be expected. Half a century is a long time in technology.
More surprising is that the computer on board the US space agency’s New Horizons probe, which reached Pluto in 2015, was also less smart than a smartphone. So too is the computer on board NASA’s Orion spacecraft that will, one day, send humans to Mars.
It may appear rather strange. NASA has been at the forefront of technology for decades, giving us cordless vacuum cleaners, solar cells, wireless headsets and air purifiers, among others. Yet it also tends to lean towards the tried and tested.
“For us, it’s all about reliability,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission. “After all, you can’t fit technology on the way to Pluto, so reliability and long parts and operations experience far trumps the need to use the fastest, newest computers in the spacecraft we send off to the planets.”
In the case of New Horizons, which launched in 2006, astronomers made use of a 32-bit Mongoose-V RISC processor with a clock speed of just 12MHz. Created by Synova, it was based on the MIPS R3000 CPU introduced in 1988, a CPU that was actually used in the original PlayStation a few years later. To ensure the chip
