Though 2020 brought big troubles with it, something great happened. On the 30th of May, the first-ever private-manned spacecraft and the first-ever spaceflight being US-manned in the nine years, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Crew Dragon has successfully sent Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken (the NASA Astronauts) into the orbit.
SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 took the astronauts which are powered by Linux and rocket fuel.
Similar to the IoT (Internet Of Things), supercomputers, and other mission-critical gadgets, Falcon 9 got off with Linux. The explanation of Falcon’s programming was made by the software engineers of SpaceX long ago.
The onboard operating system of Falcon 9 is basically a stripped-down Linux operating on three, simple dual-core x86 processors. The flight software operates individually, on a separate basis on every processor and noted in C/C++ language.
These spacecraft CPUs are away from the greatest and the latest of all. These are only created for spacecraft and the development duration thus, takes up to years and decades; from drafting to its launching.
For instance, the ISS (International Space Station) operates on Intel 80386SX, 1988-vintage 20 MHz, CPUs. Yet, we are unaware of the chips that are being used by Falcon 9.
The possibility is that their design is almost a decade old than that you or me feel is the best, currently. And while those old chips process concerning the station and monitor the multiplexer demultiplexer (C&C MDM), they aren’t much better for any other purpose.
Concerning a simple day-in and day-out work, astronauts emphasize on using HP ZBook 15s to run Scientific Linux, Debian Linux and also, Windows 10. For remote terminals to C&C MDM, the Linux Systems opt and Windows 10 is utilized to make emails, web purpose and to have fun. The CPUs that are required to stay in the space must be hardened by radiation.
