Posted by speckx 1 day ago
Their redundancy architecture is interesting. I'd be curious of what innovations went into rad-hard fabrication, too. Sandia Secure Processor (aka Score) was a neat example of rad-hard, secure processors.
Their simulation systems might be helpful for others, too. We've seen more interest in that from FoundationDB to TigerBeetle.
2.
Two.
Astronauts have actual phones with them - iPhones 17 I think? And a regular Thinkpad that they use to upload photos from the cameras. How does all of that equipment work fine with all the cosmic radiation floating about? With the iPhone's CPU in particular, shouldn't random bit flips be causing constant crashes due to errors? Or is it simply that these errors happen but nothing really detects them so the execution continues unhindered?
They’re not radiation hardened, so given enough time, they’d be expected to fail. Rebooting them might clear the issue or it might not (soft vs hard faults).
Also impossible to predict when a failure would happen, but NASA, ESA and others have data somewhere that makes them believe the risk is high enough that mission critical systems need this level of redundancy.
Yes, for sure, but that's not my question - it's not a "why is this allowed" but "why isn't this causing more visible problems with the iphones themselves".
Like, do they need constant rebooting? Does this cause any noticable problems with their operation? Realistically, when would you expect a consumer grade phone to fail in these conditions?
IIRC the Helicopter on Mars using the same snapdragon CPU in your phone.
Also, bit flip can happen without you knowing. A flip in free ram, or in a temp file that is not needed anymore won't manifest into any error, but then, your system is not really deterministic anymore since now you rely on chance.
Space is a harsher environment but they’re only up there for like a week. So, if there were an incident, it would be more likely to kill the devices, but it’s not very likely to happen during the short period of time (while still being more likely than on earth’s surface).
That said, part of the point of them taking these devices up is to find out how well they perform in practice. We just don’t really know how these consumer devices perform in space.
It will be interesting to see the results when they’re published!
Typo in the first sentence of the second paragraph is sad though. C'mon, proofread a little.
can't find a wikipedia article on it but the times had an article in 1981
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/10/us/computers-to-have-the-...
apparently the 5th was standby, not the decider
This electrify & integrate playbook has brought benefits to many industries, usually where better coordination unlocks efficiencies. Sometimes the smarts just add new failure modes and predatory vendor relationships. It’s showing up in space as more modular spacecraft, lower costs and more mission flexibility. But how is this playing out in manned space craft?