Five years ago, the Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars. Although it was launched in 2020, Perseverance used a BAE Systems RAD750 chip based on a 1997 PowerPC 750 chip. This is the same chip used in the iMac G3.
NASA uses the decades-old chip because it is proven to be durable and uses little power. But it also makes the rovers, robots, probes and spacecraft used in the mission have less processing power than the entry-level smartphones on the market today.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced that it is currently testing a new generation of space processor chips under the High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) project.
The goal of HPSC is to develop chips that can withstand the extreme environments of space and provide more than 100 times the processing power of current space chips. The chip was developed through a commercial collaboration between NASA JPL and Microchip Technology Inc.
Testing at JPL included radiation, heat, mechanical shock, and intensive functional testing to ensure durability in real-world missions. Initial results show the processor performs as designed and achieves 500 times the performance of existing radiation-hardened chips in several test scenarios.
With the more powerful chip, it will enable autonomous spacecraft systems to use artificial intelligence (AI) in complex situations without human input, faster scientific data analysis, and more efficient data transmission from deep space, as well as supporting human missions to the Moon and Mars.
