On: Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from dee...

[jCanvas]

Does anyone know they type of setup these probes have? Is it running a custom OS on custom hardware or plain old Linux on a x86 processor?

[dalke → jCanvas]

Two MA3-1750s. See http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet98/SCHMIDT2.PDF and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1750A .

No idea about OS.

[welterde → jCanvas]

Don't know about Rosetta, but at ESA LEON [1] is quite popular.

But it is certainly custom hardware and a custom OS, because you need radiation-hardened chips (even for earth-satellites) and extreme reliability.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON

[VexXtreme → welterde]

Interesting. You'd think that a custom radiation-hardened x86 or ARM variant would be sufficient.

Are there any space exploration vehicles running Linux?

[rsynnott → VexXtreme]

ARM is pretty new as a remotely high-performance thing. x86 is used a bit; the Hubble space telescope has a radiation hardened 486, for instance (originally a 386). A good few spacecraft use radiation hardened PowerPCs, M68Ks, and other common designs. Even that ESA chip isn't anything hugely custom; it's a SPARC-V8 variant.

[XorNot → VexXtreme]

Don't know about exploration, but SpaceX runs Linux for all it's rocket firmware and I imagine Dragon capsules will as well.

[ddeck → XorNot]

There was as discussion with John Muratore (SpaceX director of vehicle certification) posted on HN a while back with some interesting notes on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6125834

[TkTech → VexXtreme]

Absolutely! Hell, the ISS is all Linux now.

[InclinedPlane → TkTech]

ISS laptops run linux, the ISS control software itself does not run on linux.

[CamperBob2 → jCanvas]

VxWorks is pretty common in that business.