Thinkpads are used on the ISS but the ISS itself probably uses far more reliable and slower hardware.

http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/thinkpad-laptop-nasa-youtube-...

The ISS is still close enough to the Earth for it to experience much less radiation than it would while travelling to Mars.

Correct, and the reason it is only thinkpads, is because that particular model went through extensive testing and verification that its heat output, etc, were ok for use up there. Also I don't think they are used for critical systems.

http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Canon-readies-mini... Is interesting to see.

But as I'm developing software for my Universitie's cubesat, it's incredibly interesting to read all that goes into Single Event Upsets and other hardware failures from being outside of Earth's protective atmosphere.

ok you answered my point...but is there not another way to shield consumer electronics ? wouldn't it be cheaper to find a good shielding system (magnetic ?) than to develop expensive custom hardware ?

Ever try upgrading the CPU on an iPhone? It's like that.

These projects started out 10-15 years ago. So upgrading them mid-stream is almost impossible.

They're stuck with the hardware available when they chose that part. Re-designing for new hardware means changing everything.

I never considered that. I suppose that does give me some hope that we'll see future projects with today's hardware eventually.

Sure, but by then we'll be lamenting the lack of TrueVR(™) support that would allow us to walk the surface of Mars.

Is it an EMI issue? Slower speeds somehow stand the trip better? If there was enough money in it, I'd bet our top minds could find solutions to these problems.

Its answered downthread, but I'll tell you too and add some. The main issue is that the project started 10 years ago, and that is when the general specs were set for pretty much the whole bird. Minor upgrades are made, but you have many many teams working on many little things that have to be integrated, and that spec is 10 years old. I mean, our tech from 10 years ago is billions of times better than a Viking lander, but I get the sentiment.

For silicon devices, the VERY hard rad environment of inter-planetary space is pretty much instadeath. So you are forced to be 'dumb'. You can shield it, but that adds weight and heat issues. Redundancy is out, it just doubles/triples the weight, heat, and interfacing issues. You can use rad-hardened devices (best idea) but then you have to fab that silicon anew, and this is really expensive. Then you have to test all these things before you put them up there. So you need to put your device in a vacuum-rad chamber. Governments are not so hot on just having these rad sources laying about and letting a piece of silicon 'cook' next to a power station that is in use. So you do accelerated testing, aka, super radiation. I've been in those chambers before, it's scary. After the magic glow machines are turned off, you have to evac all the air as the O2 in the room has been turned into O3 and you can't breathe in there. The roaches in the corners are literally cooked and brittle. It's nuts. Unfortunately for your testing, this environment is more like the sun's corona than the Earth-Mars transit, so you have to take the testing with a grain of salt. Also your vac chamber is not nearly as good as real space. So everything is oxidized and hat messes up your analysis. You do the best you can, but we don't get many sample returns from outside the Earth's magnetic field to test against. NASA et al do a GREAT job, but they are dealing with very extreme jobs and we just don't have a lot of data about what we are dealing with. We can't do a lot of in situ tests.

Less speed = less heat which is surprisingly a large concern in space. The other factor is that the transistors on the chips are larger than the ones used on Earth. I don't remember the specifics but the reasoning was that less transistors would be damaged if a spot on the chip was hit by radiation and built in redundancies would be able to compensate. (Source: had a few EE classes where this kind of thing was brought up been awhile though)