What microcontroller do the Mars Rovers use?

Micro-controller !!

Somewhere I have a web site that states its a Power PC chip from IBM. Theres more CPU power on the rover than most PCs.

Now where did I put that .....

Jim R. wrote:

The MARS Rover is using a RAD 6000 computer system which is based on a RS/6000 using a special 32bit PowerPC based Processor. It is radiation sheilded. I beleive that the processor is a special radiation hardened chipas well. It's maximum clock rate is 20mhz. At this clock rate the processor only draws about 20 watts of power. They are using VME based boards forthe PCB's i the backplane. The processor is made on a special production line by Lockheed Martin in Manassas Virginia.

The OS is VxWorks RTOS from WindRiver Systems Inc.A team of eight C programmers wrote up around 150,000 lines of code for all the software. It has no hard disk drive, but it has 6meg of EEPROM for the OS with backup copies of all the software. Plus it uses 128meg of RAM for all the regular stuff going on. Humm...I forget if this was the flight computer or the rover though or all of the above.

The old Sojourner rover from the earlier Mars mission has a special Intel

Lol, not really.

Processing power was much less of an issue than reliability and low-power consumption. I don't think a PowerPC running at 20 MHz really overpowers a recent PC.

From

The Onboard Computer The rovers use a RAD6000 computer produced by BAE systems. This processor is nearly identical in architecture to an old PowerPC processor used in early Macintosh computers. By today's standards, these processors are slow. They run at 20 megahertz, about 1/100th the speed of a typical desktop computer today. They have 128 kilobytes (KB) of RAM, 256 KB of flash memory and some ROM to hold the boot code and operating system. There are no disk drives.

Although they are slow and incredibly expensive ($200K to $300K per computer), they have two big advantages:

1. They are radiation-hardened so they are immune to the cosmic radiation falling on Mars. 2. They run the ultra-reliable VxWorks (PDF) real-time operating system from Wind River Systems.

This computer makes the rover that much more reliable than a typical desktop computer because it is never crashing or corrupting data.

The computer helps with power management, image processing, motor control, and instrument management. It also handles navigation. The rover has six navigation cameras arranged in three pairs. The computer processes stereo images from the camera pairs. It uses binocular vision algorithms, and it can identify the distance to and size of the different rocks in the field of view. Using this information, the computer can build a map of all the nearby obstacles and then maneuver the rover to avoid them when it is moving.

It apears like spirit did not read this statement...

Markus