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Comment by jCanvas | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know they type of setup these probes have? Is it running a custom OS on custom hardware or plain old Linux on a x86 processor?

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Two MA3-1750s. See http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet98/SCHMIDT2.PDF and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1750A .

No idea about OS.

Don't know about Rosetta, but at ESA LEON [1] is quite popular.

But it is certainly custom hardware and a custom OS, because you need radiation-hardened chips (even for earth-satellites) and extreme reliability.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON

Interesting. You'd think that a custom radiation-hardened x86 or ARM variant would be sufficient.

Are there any space exploration vehicles running Linux?

Absolutely! Hell, the ISS is all Linux now.

ISS laptops run linux, the ISS control software itself does not run on linux.

Don't know about exploration, but SpaceX runs Linux for all it's rocket firmware and I imagine Dragon capsules will as well.

There was as discussion with John Muratore (SpaceX director of vehicle certification) posted on HN a while back with some interesting notes on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6125834

ARM is pretty new as a remotely high-performance thing. x86 is used a bit; the Hubble space telescope has a radiation hardened 486, for instance (originally a 386). A good few spacecraft use radiation hardened PowerPCs, M68Ks, and other common designs. Even that ESA chip isn't anything hugely custom; it's a SPARC-V8 variant.

VxWorks is pretty common in that business.

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