[HN Gopher] Ingenuity had more computing power than all NASA dee...
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Ingenuity had more computing power than all NASA deep space
missions combined
Author : rntn
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-01-29 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| jahnu wrote:
| > an automobile-sized nuclear-powered drone over the organic-rich
| sands on Titan
|
| Wow! Can't wait for Dragonfly!
| Denote6737 wrote:
| "The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than
| everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined," Tzanetos
| said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power
| that has flown on NASA's big missions beyond Earth orbit, from
| Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the
| tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.
|
| This is what blows my mind. a 2015 smart phone has more power
| than everything else. proof that modern programming can be
| massively wasteful on resources.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > proof that modern programming can be massively wasteful on
| resources
|
| Depends what you consider resources. CPU cycles are resources.
| Programmer hours are resources.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > This is what blows my mind. a 2015 smart phone has more power
| than everything else.
|
| Not really. The things that regular end-users do on their
| smartphones are computationally much more intensive than what
| you deploy on the edge in space. I'll be the first to gripe
| about the inefficiencies of modern front-end programming, but
| the software on a Mars rover also just doesn't have that much
| number-crunching or throwing around ginormous assets to do.
|
| A much more interesting question is to ask what you could do on
| Mars if you had that compute power. For example, how realistic
| is it to expand further on autonomous capability.
| zokier wrote:
| Percy has some degree of autonomous driving capabilities,
| requiring fair bit of image processing. I'm sure the autonav
| programmers would love more compute to be able to literally
| drive faster; the improvements from Curiosity to Perseverance
| already made huge difference.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| The question is whether you need to. Yeah, it would be cool.
| Yeah, you could probably go faster. But usually, none of that
| is worth it. The science can still get done without it.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| One Voyager probe cost a billion dollar. I'm not sure your Todo
| app can afford to be written in assembly.
| patrickwalton wrote:
| More than anything, this is great evidence that traditional
| aerospace has greatly overestimated the risks of using mass-
| produced terrestrial hardware.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You have to understand that most space missions are essentially
| webcams attached to a remote-controlled vehicle. You don't need
| hardly any onboard processing 99% of the time if you're just
| executing a sequence of actuator commands and maintaining PID
| loops.
|
| It's only very recently that they've started to _look_ at what
| the sensors are giving _onboard the craft_. I 'm glossing over
| some very important details, but mainly, the sentiment holds:
| Spacecraft didn't have to _do_ much, so they didn 't have to
| _think_ much.
| jkestner wrote:
| So the big change seems to be foregoing the usual radiation
| hardened components. Was the calculation that this was less risky
| for planetary exploration, or the standard risk was acceptable
| given that it was not the central thrust of the mission? What
| would the total cost look like if you could launch several
| redundant cheap probes instead of an NASA-grade one anytime this
| is a question?
|
| Interesting to see how the lithium batteries did with such
| extreme temperature cycling. And here I am bringing my mower
| batteries inside in a cold snap.
| DylanSp wrote:
| My guess would be the latter. Ingenuity was primarily a
| technology demonstration whose failure wouldn't impact
| Perseverance's main objectives, so the risk was probably
| acceptable.
|
| As for launching several cheap, redundant probes - I think the
| biggest issue would be the cost of the scientific instruments.
| I don't have the background to know how much money could be
| saved you by using commercially available equipment. The basic
| scientific requirements might be too specialized for cheap
| commercial equivalents to exist, though maybe not; I really
| don't know.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| My weed whacker batteries stay inside because the summer heat
| makes them nearly unusable.
|
| I am surprised you are mowing the lawn and a cold snap though
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Note, also, that just being on a planetary surface
| significantly reduces your radiation exposure even if the
| planet doesn't have magnetic fields. The body of the planet
| shields you from the sun half the time. A thin atmosphere also
| has some effect.
|
| In addition, being on a planetary surface greatly reduces the
| thermal cycling. In free space, the instantaneous thermal
| gradient on your spacecraft could be several hundred degrees,
| which the spacecraft either has to mitigate via thermal control
| or it just has to take; usually it will do some of both, so the
| electronics do need to survive a not insignificant thermal
| cycle.
|
| You never get that on Mars. The planet is a huge heat sink.
| olabyne wrote:
| Does this mean the radiation hardening is a bit overkill for some
| applications ? I mean, even if the 801 Soc is really weak against
| radiations (apparently, not that weak for a 90day+ mission), it
| might be better to just throw 2 or 3 of them with redundancy
| instead of going for the good old RAD750 and its pound of weight,
| crazy cost and weak performances ?
|
| Or is just crazy luck and the thing avoided the beams ? Might be
| plausible, if the last flight is not explained, it was the one
| flight with less radiation luck ?
| DylanSp wrote:
| I'm very curious if any analysis on this can be done and
| published, though I imagine it's difficult without access to
| the actual equipment.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Goddard does do a lot of radiation testing on commercial
| chips. I believe they usually publish the results and should
| be able to look it up.
|
| Edit: database here, but I haven't looked for data on the
| chip: https://radhome.gsfc.nasa.gov/radhome/raddatabase/radda
| tabas...
| mattlondon wrote:
| Interesting data - I couldn't find the Snapdragon 801 ...
| but they have tested a nVidia Geforce 1050
| (https://nepp.nasa.gov/files/29573/NEPP-TR-2018-Wyrwas-
| TR-17-...)
|
| I wonder why they are testing GPUs? I would imagine there
| are at least some people somewhere writing papers about
| sending GPUs on rovers etc for better on-device AI/ML (e.g.
| image processing)
|
| Also: brief mention of raspberry pi (no dedicated wreite-up
| like the GPU): https://nepp.nasa.gov/files/27888/NEPP-
| CP-2015-Campola-Paper...
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Yeah I didn't find it there either, but there is an IEEE
| paper with testing [0]. Looks like they only did single
| event effect testing (SEE) and not total ionizing dose
| (TID) as well. The SEE is for looking and effects for
| individual memory upsets, latchup, gate rupture, etc. You
| can still do a lot with a chip if you are only getting
| the non-destrucrive effects with memory scrubbing and
| resets (as long as you're not mission critical). But the
| destructive effects (like gate rupture) are the ones that
| could make this totally infeasible depending on the
| limit.
|
| Not surprised that they didn't do TID as it was only
| supposed to be a 90 day demo mission so not terribly
| long. And TID can be a costly test because it can take so
| long.
|
| As to the GPUs, yeah the main application is some
| processing when you are comm bandwidth constrained. Then
| you can send down processed products or snapshots from
| something that is collecting a lot of data (like large
| imager or high bandwidth SDR)
|
| [0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8906649
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Primarily for machine vision applications, both for
| robotic satellite servicing and for e.g. processing earth
| imagery data onboard to reduce downlink requirements.
|
| Goddard does quite a lot of work on camera-based RPO
| (rendezvous and proximity operations) which require
| cameras and lidars to image a client spacecraft and
| calculate relative pose. This is the single most
| computationally taxing operation for robotic satellite
| servicing missions.
| icyfox wrote:
| I know this is what most of the SpaceX mission control systems
| do. They're set up with ~3x/5x redundancy for effectively
| consumer hardware. If they detect memory misalignment between
| 1/3 of the nodes, they'll power cycle it while the other 2 take
| primary control. Big cost savings by not having to purchase
| radiation-hardened hardware and AFAIK they see similar
| reliability.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Iirc, that's how the space shuttle control systems worked as
| well, but they were not COTS...
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Yes, most of the manned missions (at least Apollo and
| beyond as far as I'm aware) use the belt and suspenders
| approach of triple voting rad-hardened processors. So 3x
| RAD750s in a voting redundancy for main control systems.
| mhandley wrote:
| I believe the shuttles used five computers - four ran the
| same software and voted if there was a discrepency, whereas
| the fifth ran simpler independently developed software in
| case a common bug rendered all four primary computers
| inoperable.
| causi wrote:
| It stopped being about reliability twenty years ago. Now it's
| about lining pockets. The current top of the line RAD5545 is
| based on a chip from 2010 with 45nm lithography. It consumes 20
| watts to perform 3.7GFLOPS. A Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a TDP of
| 12w and does 4.7TFLOPS. Over a thousand times the performance
| at less than a thousandth the price.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| TL;dr an interesting frame through which to view Ingenuity use of
| off-the-shelf components,
|
| is as an indicator of where we are in the Moore's Law (etc.) type
| views on the inverse performance and cost curves in our
| computational infrastruture.
|
| There was some implicit dotted line in N-space representing the
| necessary reliability, performance, weight, etc. characteristics
| required for multi-million-dollar NASA missions.
|
| The take-away is that we have now advanced the industry
| _generally_ such that with are we can be over that line.
|
| I can connect this, observationally, to a hardware startup I was
| employee #1 at many years ago. At the time a friend started his
| company, it had only just--perhaps in a 12 month window--become
| viable for two people to design, program, and ship a hardware
| product based on embedded systems on microcontrollers, fast-turn
| PCB fabrication, and to do mechanical design in e.g. Solidworks
| on a PC. At the time, data sheets were still delivered via FAX
| trees. McMaster-Carr and Digikey were all we eneeded. It COULD be
| done, and we did it.
|
| It felt at the time like what we were able to do represented a
| collective crossing of some event horizon. The garage was back,
| baby.
|
| That we have now crossed a similar threshold wrt putting largely
| autonomous flying bots on Mars I didn't foresee. Nonlinearity is
| hard.
|
| But at moments like these I do like to try to look over my
| shoulder, ahead. Where in another 25 years?
|
| I'll play. Autonomous mesh-networked group-mind self-repairing
| and possibly bootstrap-replicating vestigial von Nuemann probes,
| populating and mapping the ocean worlds of the gas giants.
|
| And I'll bet that's conservative--one X factor being just how
| long it takes to get out there. But I'm cautiously optimistic we
| will be getting there in sub-year travel times by then.
| gone35 wrote:
| Key quote:
|
| "The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially
| bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn't fry the
| Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn't destroy the
| battery's storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and
| cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-
| rated mandates."
| yummybear wrote:
| That's gotta hurt the radsafe equipment manufacturers
| Casteil wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not.. human-rated equipment will (almost
| certainly) always be held to a higher standard than
| autonomous drones/rovers.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Somewhat, it will definitely tip the needle for those who are
| on the fence about their risk posture with radiation. But the
| surface of Mars is by no means the worst radiation
| environment. For overall dose levels, the surface of Mars is
| about 2.5x worse than being on the ISS [0], which is in
| general a very low radiation environment.
|
| If you look at slide 15 of this presentation [1] "TID (Total
| Ionizing Dose) Mitigation", the ISS would be in the "LEO-LOW"
| category on the curve. When you start looking at the MEO and
| GEO orbits you have to start contending with the trapped
| proton and electrons of the radiation belts. Not a whole lot
| in MEO outside of the various GNSS constellations, but tons
| of things in GEO that still have doses that are orders of
| magnitude more.
|
| [0] https://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/topten.cfm?topten=10#:~:text=M
| ars....
|
| [1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1524958
| inamberclad wrote:
| I assume that, despite their lack of design pedigree, JPL still
| thoroughly tested all these components and discarded many that
| didn't make the cut.
| ls612 wrote:
| What are they planning to install as the computer for the Titan
| helicopter mission launching in 2026?
| kenhwang wrote:
| My dad's friend worked at JPL on Ingenuity's software. When I
| talked to him about it in 2019, he was sure he was going to
| retire after the rover launched/landed, because he thought all
| the consumer hardware would probably not work on Mars for very
| long and there'd be nothing to do after that.
|
| I remember he was ranting about how they used Python. Like they
| had so much compute power available they could just "waste" it
| running "slow as hell" Python. It was such a departure from all
| his previous rover missions where they very judiciously optimized
| low level code.
|
| When we met up in 2023, we were still surprised he was working.
| He was too since he didn't expect Ingenuity to be in service for
| that long, but he figured, "well, no one's going to train a
| replacement for me, might as well see my last mission to its
| end."
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