We're talking launching stuff into space, every kg of extra weight is critical, particularly for scientific missions that are trying to do as much as possible. Also no amount of radiation shielding is going to make you perfectly shielded from cosmic rays.
It's actually a chronic problem with Voyagers 1/2. The teams that maintain them regularly experience weird, unplanned behavior because a cosmic ray bit-flipped some register or other, and then they have to manually figure out what erroneous command got executed and how to recover from it, and those are extremely simple systems compared to what's running on Perseverance.
So yeah, you need radiation hardened parts in space or you're just begging for a dead probe.
There are three computer systems on each Voyager. They are dedicated to specific tasks (Flight Control System, Attitude and Articulation Control System, and Computer Command Subsystem), each with two instances for redundancy.
Right, but that redundancy to my understanding is in case of component/system failure. It's a backup, not a judge-actor or error-correcting architecture.
"Engineers successfully reset a computer onboard Voyager 2 that caused an unexpected data pattern shift, and the spacecraft resumed sending properly formatted science data back to Earth on Sunday, May 23. Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had been operating the spacecraft in engineering mode since May 6. They took this action as they traced the source of the pattern shift to the flip of a single bit in the flight data system computer that packages data to transmit back to Earth. In the next week, engineers will be checking the science data with Voyager team scientists to make sure instruments onboard the spacecraft are processing data correctly. "
It's actually a chronic problem with Voyagers 1/2. The teams that maintain them regularly experience weird, unplanned behavior because a cosmic ray bit-flipped some register or other, and then they have to manually figure out what erroneous command got executed and how to recover from it, and those are extremely simple systems compared to what's running on Perseverance.
So yeah, you need radiation hardened parts in space or you're just begging for a dead probe.