
International Space Station computer gets a heart transplant - kylegordon
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/International_Space_Station_computer_gets_a_heart_transplant
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giggitytex
So fun to read. In my early career I used to think that replacing memory in
servers used for production was risky. What if I could not get it done in
time? Chaos!

Later I worked in a refinery when replacing mission critical items could
seriously mean injury or death if mishandled. What if I made a mistake? Chaos!

Now, I realize what I was doing was child's play!

~~~
MS90
Do it wrong and the life support systems for you and your friends up there go
out and you all die. Also, this entire $150,000,000,000 international
investment may lose guidance and altitude control and burn up in the
atmosphere, or maybe even rain down debris on some unlucky city.

No pressure!

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Iirc, mission critical aerospace computers have triple redundancy since like
... forever.

So I can't believe the ISS computer doesn't have some sort of redundancy in
place to prevent a catastrophe when there's so much money and lives at stake.

But I liked your joke.

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hvidgaard
Did you read the article? If you did you'd know that they run two computers.
If one fail, a third automatically activates and the faulty is disabled. They
also keep a fourth to swap out the failed one.

But it still doesn't change the fact that swapping out with a completely new
specification can have unintended consequences. They waited until a computer
failed to swap, so if it did not work, they'd run at reduced redundancy.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_Did you read the article?_

From the HN guidelines:

 _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read
the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions
that."_

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EddieCPU
From my days as a repair techie, sounds like just another board-pulling call-
out job, I could do it for $343 (per hour) including VAT. But NASA would have
to provide transport.

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ceejayoz
Does your business insurance cover equipment valued at $100B, though?

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tr352
I wonder what kind of hardware and software (CPU and OS) we’re talking about
here.

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rootbear
It was remarkably difficult to dig up any specifics on this. But I finally
found the linked PDF below. It says this about the DMS-R:

"Another example is EADS DMS-R, a computer board based on ERC32 (Atmel TSC695)
processor, and a fault-tolerant TMR version using 3 boards for the ATV of the
ISS (Autonomous Transport Vehicle of the International Space Station)."

I looked up the Atmel chip and it is a radiation hardened implementation of
the SPARC v7 architecture. I was a little surprised it wasn't a RAD6000, since
I saw elsewhere that BAE was involved. Their RAD line of hardened Power PC
processors is quite popular in spacecraft systems.

[https://webee.technion.ac.il/~ran/papers/SurveySpaceProcesso...](https://webee.technion.ac.il/~ran/papers/SurveySpaceProcessors.DASIA2012.pdf)

