
The Last POWER1 CPU on Mars Is Dead - bellinom
https://www.talospace.com/2019/02/the-last-power1-on-mars-is-dead.html
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yingw787
Might be O/T, but I found it really interesting how they mention "5,352
Martian solar days". Do we humans have plans in the pipeline for a universal
time standard we can use wherever we are? Something that is a little more
useful than "seconds since UNIX epoch" but something a little less terrestrial
than UTC? Or is time going to be based wherever we land or travel (e.g. divide
up Mars into time zones upon colonization)? If we don't have a formal ISO
solution, it might be a good idea to start pinning one down; might be relevant
by the time the standard is finalized.

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JumpCrisscross
> _Do we humans have plans in the pipeline for a universal time standard we
> can use wherever we are?_

This fundamentally cannot exist. Any "universal" system would drift for
observers on different planets. Having different times in New York and New
Delhi isn't the worst right now; doing a calendar look-up for the time on Mars
isn't as neat. But given we won't have real-time communication, it isn't as
big of a problem either.

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sagartewari01
It doesn't appear to be impossible.

Setup a transmitter at earth which emits a signal at uniform intervals
containing current time (seconds since kanye west's marriage). An observer can
then deduce current time if it knows where it is. I don't think relativistic
dilation would effect this method.

With multiple such emitters synchronized with each other, one might even be
able to 'triangulate' the current time. (I haven't worked out any details)

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bunderbunder
I'm not sure I see what you'd be gaining there, though. You'd be, at great
expense, trading one basket of headaches - clocks not staying in sync - for
another one: one second measuring a different length of time on each planet.

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sagartewari01
Yes but then earth's one second would become the standard. This method is
supposed to synchronize events between stations. We can always use atomic
clocks for local uses.

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saagarjha
There are still Power chips (based on PowerPC 750) on Curiosity; it's just
POWER1 that's dead:

> That's not the end of Power ISA chips on Mars, though: Curiosity, which is
> running a pair of RAD750s (one main and one backup, plus two SPARC accessory
> CPUs), is still in operation at 2,319 Mars solar days and ticking.

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Aardwolf
> it's just POWER1 that's dead

Is it certain that the chip is not still getting some power and running
something?

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bdamm
Kind of a Schrödinger's cat problem, is it not? For all purposes it is dead to
us.

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inamberclad
Do people have a particular attachment to the power architecture?

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ajdlinux
There's still a reasonable PPC Mac/Amiga hobbyist community, many of whom will
tell you about how much purer PowerPC is compared to the evil ugly x86. As
someone who does PPC Linux kernel work the pragmatic part of me would like to
drop support for a lot of these older machines, but as long as the machines
are still actively used the support gets maintained.

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djsumdog
There are newer PPCs as well, like the Talon motherboards.

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ajdlinux
Indeed - the Talos machines are the first new PPC desktops in quite a while.
The IBM POWER CPU series is far from dead, just post-Macintosh / PS3/Wii/XB360
consoles, it's not really something you see in the consumer space any more -
apart from Talos, which I'm pretty excited about.

(Disclosure: I work for IBM.)

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snvzz
Sadly too expensive for anybody to bother.

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starpilot
Goodnight, sweet prince.

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Thermolabile
I like to think of those more recent PPC Mars machines as Nintendo GameCubes
with robotic arms and eyes. Same G3 processor family, afterall.

Well, at least they should be able to browse the web with the G3 version of
TenFourFox. ;)

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daniel_iversen
Why does it have SPARC architecture CPUs as well I wonder? Any guesses?

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masklinn
It's unclear whether you're asking why they have both SPARC and PPC chips, or
what the SPARCs are used for.

For the former, different contractors for the features, with some contractors
preferring RHPPC and other RHSPARC?

For the latter, one SPARCs controlled the thrusters and descent stage, the
other controls the movement (it's the main chip of the motor controller).

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d33
So, in other words, the machine's still alive, but has no backup CPU?

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merubin75
"Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and
an up-loss timer fault. The team is continuing to listen for the rover over a
broad range of times, frequencies and polarizations using the Deep Space
Network (DSN) Radio Science Receiver. The team has begun mission clock fault
recovery commanding 'in the blind,' in the hopes of catching the rover during
an awake period, as their strategy of last resort."

Source: NASA mission update for sols 5340-5346 (Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 2019)
[https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover-
status/opportunity/r...](https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover-
status/opportunity/recent/all/)

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ddtaylor
Are these powered by battery or solar, or both?

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centizen
The rovers would only receive about 4 hours of sunlight in a day, so Li-Ion
batteries are used to store enough charge to keep it running reliably.

Newer rovers like curiosity are using radioisotope generators which should
last a much longer time.

