Intel boasted that the rover received two COMEX-IE38 modules from the company CompuLab, which are based on the Bay Trail generation Intel Atom processors.
As you know, the heart of the Perseverance rover is a very old 200-megahertz radiation-resistant special processor RAD750 worth about 200 thousand dollars. At the same time, the Ingenuity helicopter is based on a much more modern Snapdragon 801 SoC.
As it turned out, the rover can also boast of a more modern solution, and also comes from the consumer segment.
Now Intel has boasted that the rover has received two of the company's COMEX-IE38 modules CompuLab, designed to work with photos and videos that Perseverance takes.
These modules, firstly, are available to everyone at a price of about $ 150, and secondly, are based on Intel Atom processors of the Bay Trail generation.
This board runs on Linux OS. The Perseverance rover is equipped with 23 cameras, data from which is transmitted in RAW format over a local Ethernet network, compressed by the COMEX-IE38 module and stored on a 480-gigabyte SSD drive for subsequent transmission to Earth (see the link for details ).
The developers explained the reason for using the solution on Intel Atom by the need for strict energy savings in the rover, as well as extremely difficult heat removal from the chips in the extremely rarefied atmosphere of Mars (99.4% less dense than on Earth). Until now, the use of these boards in the NASA rover was kept secret.
