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Home > RAD6000


The RAD6000 radiation-hardened single board computer, based on the IBM POWER CPU, is manufactured by BAE SYSTEMS and is mainly known as the onboard computer of numerous NASA spacecraft. Its instruction set is similar to early members of the PowerPC processor family.

The radiation-hardening of the original POWER 1.1 million- transistor processor to make the RAD6000's CPU was done by IBM Federal Systems (now part of BAE SYSTEMS) working with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. In addition to 77 satellites ( as of 2003), the processor is/was used in:

The computer has a maximum clock rate of 25  MHzA megahertz (MHz is one million (106) hertz, a measure of frequency. Megahertz in radio When used in the context of radio, MHz refers to the number of oscillations of electromagnetic radiation. Severel parts of the radio spectrum fall into the MHz range:. In addition to the CPU itself, the RAD6000 has 128  MBA megabyte is a unit of measurement for computer storage, memory and information; while its exact definition varies, it is in theory equal to one million bytes. The symbol for megabyte is MB (note B for Byte, lowercase b would mean bit). Three definitions of error-detecting-and-correcting RAM. A typical RTOSA Real Time Operating System or RTOS is an operating system that has been developed for real-time applications. Typically used for embedded applications. Note that this type of operating system does not necessarily have high throughput — the specialized s running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorksVxWorks made and sold by Wind River Systems of Alameda, California, USA, is a real-time operating system. Similar real-time operating systems are available from other vendors: QNX, LynxOS, VRTX, pSOS, Nucleus RTX, OSE etc. The name VxWorks is believed to. A RAD6000 computer is reported to cost between US$200,000 and US$300,000.

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