What do NASA's Mars rover and a 1998 iMac have in common?

The $2.7-billion robotic explorer, currently on the Martian surface, has one thing in common with something closer home

NASA's Perseverance rover and its sibling, the Ingenuity helicopter, landed on Mars on February 18, bristling with antennas and cameras.

Perseverance, the third robotic visitor from Earth to arrive at the red planet, will spend the next Martian year — the equivalent of two Earth years — collecting rocks, scrutinizing and photographing them.

But the $2.7-billion robotic explorer has one thing in common with something closer home. The rover has the same processor as the original iMac G3 or the 'Bondi Blue' from 1998.

The original iMac used a PowerPC G3 or the PowerPC 750 processor which mirrors the one used in Perseverance, said a report in The Verge. The processor, a single-core, 233MHz processor with just 6 million transistors, was also used in NASA's Curiosity rover, a car-sized rover exploring the red planet which was launched in 2011.

So why such an outdated processor for such a sophisticated machine?

The report says that the conditions on Mars could actually be counterproductive for a more advanced processor. Compared to Earth's atmosphere, the atmosphere on the red planet does not offer as much insulation from harmful radiation and charged particles. This could mess up a modern, more complex processor. The Perseverance rover has two computing modules, one being a backup in case of a mishap.

Perseverance's processor, a RAD750 chip, is slightly more advanced than the one used in the iMac G3 and is built keeping Mars's radiations in mind. It operates at up to 200 megahertz speed, 10 times the speed in Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity's computers.

Coming to memory power, Perseverance boasts 2 gigabytes of flash memory, 256 megabytes of dynamic random access memory (RAM), and 256 kilobytes of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory. The computer also contains special memory to tolerate the extreme radiation environment that exists in space and on the Martian surface, says NASA.

(With inputs from International New York Times)

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