A few things about great NASA Curiosity mission you may have missed!
Apple was almost everywhere in this mission… just check out this photo of the EDL Ops Center (Entry-Descent-Land Operation) :
Mac OS X looks like the weapon of choice of Rocket Scientists, due to its Unix-ish roots in BSD.
Moreover, looks like the RAD 750 processor, running the Curiosity Rover, it’s an evolution of the beloved PowerPC 750, right the one that powered G3-series Macintoshes.
Talking about hardware, Gizmodo reports this fun comparison with an iPhone 4S…
If you’re more curious about the Rover’s hardware and gear, take a look at Time’s Page.
More details about the computing side of the Rover:
Rover Compute Element (RCE)
Curiosity employs two computers, one for daily operation and one for backup, each packing a 200 MHz IBM RAD750 (based on IBM’s late 1990s 32-bit PowerPC processors), 256 MB of RAM, 2GB of flash storage and running a multitasking operating system called VxWorks (used in multiple other spacecraft, including both Spirit and Opportunity rovers).
Last but not least, Rovio announced they will celebrate the Curiosity Mission with an Angry Birds Space Red Planet Update!!!
