RAD6000: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The RAD6000 radiation-hardened single board computer, based on the IBM POWER CPU, is manufactured by BAE SYSTEMS and is mainly known as the onboard computer of numerous NASA spacecraft. Its instruction set is similar to early members of the PowerPC processor family.

The radiation-hardening of the original POWER 1.1 million-transistor processor to make the RAD6000's CPU was done by IBM Federal Systems (now part of BAE SYSTEMS) working with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. In addition to 77 satellites (as of 2003), the processor is/was used in:

• the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers
• the Mars Pathfinder lander
• the Deep Space 1 probe
• the Mars Polar Lander
• the Mars Odyssey orbiter
• the Spitzer Infrared Telescope Facility
• the MESSENGER probe to Mercury,

The computer has a maximum clock rate of 25 MHz. In addition to the CPU itself, the RAD6000 has 128 MB of error-detecting-and-correcting RAM. A typical RTOS running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorks. A RAD6000 computer is reported to cost between US$200,000 and US$300,000.