Extreme Computer Hardware

Had a good lunch and launch today. I got onto nasa.gov and watched the launch of the Atlantis on its Hubble repair mission. Usually it's cold cut sandwiches and lukewarm website news.

Hubble is possibly the best large-scale cold-war “technology spin-off” that I am aware of outside of Google's Earth application. Hubble is obviously based on the KH10/11 spy satellite series. Google's Earth displays the output of similar satellite technology for a lot of its maps combined with aero-survey footage used all around the world.

What was especially impressive was that some months back when the primary control computer on Hubble failed, the secondary took over with just a couple of hiccups and a little work. Not bad for a 19 year old computer that has been freezing and baking in hard vacuum and being blasted with radiation for all that time!

Turns out NASA had a spare computer on Earth that was also 19 years old. It got all the testing required to qualify as a new piece of space hardware and it passed. So the astronauts will be taking the spare with them to replace the failed primary. I realize that it's probably an 8 or 16 bit-banger with limited amount of radiation-hardened RAM. But imagine having a still working computer after sitting in a high radiation environment for 19 years. I wish some of our industrial computers were half that tough!