Apple iMac G3 Powering NASA’s Perseverance Rover Using 23-Year-Old Computer Processor

When NASA's Perseverance Rover guided itself to the Red Planet's surface on February 18, 2021, it did so with the help of the same processor that ran the iMac G3 in the late 1990s.

iMac G3, according to Engadget, is the colorful and all-in-one desktop that saved the business of Apple and helped the company become what it is at present.

According to the New Scientist, this latest rover of NASA features an offshoot of the PowerPC 750 CPU. This said processor is roughly 23 years this year.

By modern standards, the PowerPC 750, the tech information site said, is nothing to write about. It is a one-core processor that has roughly six million transistors and a 233MHz clock speed.

If that's compared to the recently-announced M1 chipset of Apple, which comprises 16 billion transistors and a maximum 3.2GHz clock speed, one is referring to a very modest CPU in the PowerPC 750. However, speed is not the reason NASA pushed through with it.

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Science Times - NASA Perseverance Rover Lands On Mars — NASA's Perseverance (Mars 2020) rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet's surface for future missions to retrieve in the area known as Jezero crater on the planet Mars. NASA via Getty Images

Proven Dependability

When it comes to technology, NASA has a thing for proven dependability. In just one instance, in 2006, NASA equipped its New Horizons probe, described in an Observer article, using a Mongoose-V processor, a radiation-hardened edition of the original MIPS R3000 CPU of PlayStation.

And when sending a $2.4-billion worth of rover on a single trip to a planet that's at its nearest 38.6 million miles away from planet Earth, there is a need for a CPU that is, above all, dependable.

This is what exactly the PowerPC 750 has exhibited itself to be over and over. Meanwhile, the RAD750 version of the PowerPC 750 found inside the Perseverance rover has been hardened so it could withstand 200,000 to 1,000,000 Rads and temperature between -55 and 125 degrees Celsius or -67 and 257 degrees Fahrenheit. At present, RAD750 is in approximately 100 satellites in orbit around Earth and all of them are still working.

NASA's Latest Rover

NASA's latest rover, the Perseverance rover, as seen on NASA's YouTube video below, is part of the Mars Exploration Program of the agency, a long-term initiative of robotic exploration Mars.

Furthermore, the said mission addresses Mars exploration's high-priority science goals, which include key questions on the possible life of the Red Planet.

The mission is taking the next step by not just searching for signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the olden times, but looking for signs too of past bacterial life itself.

This latest rover of NASA introduces a drill that can retrieve core samples of the most promising soils and rocks and separate them in a cache on Mars' surface.

The mission provides opportunities as well to collect knowledge and exhibit technologies that deal with the challenges of future expeditions of humans to Mars.

These comprise testing a procedure for generating oxygen from the atmosphere in Mars, identifying other sources like subsurface water, enhancing landing techniques, and characterizing dust, weather, as well as other probable environmental conditions that could impact future astronauts living and working on the Red Planet.