IBM's Power Architecture used in NASA Mars Lander

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 8/3/2007

Big Blue is on board to go to the red planet.

IBM Corp. today announced NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, which is planned to head to the polar north of Mars where it will dig into the frozen surface in search of evidence of potentially life-sustaining substances, will be outfitted with a radiation-hardened RAD6000 computer by BAE Systems and based on IBM's Power Architecture.

The launch of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled for Saturday, August 4, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

This is not IBM's first inclusion in a Mars mission. In 2003 NASA launched the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers toward Mars to see if water was ever present on the planet. The mission, originally planned for 90 days, continues today. The key instruments on both rovers relied on a single board computer built with a 32-bit Power Architecture licensed to BAE Systems by IBM and a RAD6000 processor radiation hardened by BAE systems, IBM said.

According to IBM, the RAD6000 will process navigational data and drive key systems both in space and on the planet surface. The RAD6000's open architecture will be programmable from workstations to supercomputers, IBM said.

The program cost for the Phoenix launch is $420 million dollars and launch opportunities come only once every 26 months, IBM said. Once on the surface following a 423 million mile journey, Phoenix will endure temperatures down to -100 degrees Fahrenheit and wind speeds of up to 40 meters per second—about 90 miles per hour.

"We are honored that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has selected the Power Architecture and the BAE Systems-based RAD6000 to be an integral part of a mission that may answer the age old question: Could life exist on another planet?" Adalio Sanchez, general manager of global engineering solutions for IBM, said in a statement.