COTS surprisingly resistant to Martian radiation

[Lukexcom]

Kind of reminds me of Stuart’s assertations that commercial electronics are a lot tougher to radiation exposure, and even EMPs/SREEs, than the many doom-and-gloom prophecies.

In this case, NASA’s Ingenuity drone copter flying on Mars was built with straight COTS hardware, a Qualcomm MCU, standard MEMS, and other gear that would be considered anathema for any previous space mission.

And not just this mission, but SpaceX is known to fly three x86 CPUs in an Actor-Judge configuration in both the Falcon 9/Heavy series of rockets, and in Crew Dragon as well.

This, of course does not eliminate the expensive, old, heavy, and incredibly slow rad-hardened architectures like the RAD750 from missions into our Van Allen belts, to Jupiter/Saturn, or any Sunward flights.

But it does show that LEO and Mars operations do not necessarily need the traditional approach.

The story, from the excellent Eric “War Criminal” Berger:
It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew

[brovane]

I remember comments that when SpaceX showed that COTS hardware worked Dragon that doesn't mean it could work beyond Earth orbit. Now we have the answer to that.