Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space hibernation

Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by jCanvas on Monday January 20, 2014 @07:03PM (#7092495)

Does anyone know they type of setup these probes have? Is it running a custom OS on custom hardware or plain old Linux on a x86 processor?

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by dalke on Monday January 20, 2014 @07:17PM (#7092543)

Two MA3-1750s. See http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet98/SCHMIDT2.PDF and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1750A .

No idea about OS.

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by welterde on Monday January 20, 2014 @07:16PM (#7092539)

Don't know about Rosetta, but at ESA LEON [1] is quite popular.

But it is certainly custom hardware and a custom OS, because you need radiation-hardened chips (even for earth-satellites) and extreme reliability.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by VexXtreme on Monday January 20, 2014 @10:31PM (#7093262)

Interesting. You'd think that a custom radiation-hardened x86 or ARM variant would be sufficient.

Are there any space exploration vehicles running Linux?

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by rsynnott on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @10:00AM (#7095596)

ARM is pretty new as a remotely high-performance thing. x86 is used a bit; the Hubble space telescope has a radiation hardened 486, for instance (originally a 386). A good few spacecraft use radiation hardened PowerPCs, M68Ks, and other common designs. Even that ESA chip isn't anything hugely custom; it's a SPARC-V8 variant.

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by XorNot on Monday January 20, 2014 @11:41PM (#7093493)

Don't know about exploration, but SpaceX runs Linux for all it's rocket firmware and I imagine Dragon capsules will as well.

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by ddeck on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @02:13AM (#7093882)

There was as discussion with John Muratore (SpaceX director of vehicle certification) posted on HN a while back with some interesting notes on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6125834

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by TkTech on Monday January 20, 2014 @11:00PM (#7093347)

Absolutely! Hell, the ISS is all Linux now.

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by InclinedPlane on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @05:31AM (#7094430)

ISS laptops run linux, the ISS control software itself does not run on linux.

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Re:Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space... by CamperBob2 on Monday January 20, 2014 @07:53PM (#7092686)

VxWorks is pretty common in that business.

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