alt Hacker NewsSo honest and perhaps a bit stupid question.
Astronauts have actual phones with them - iPhones 17 I think? And a regular Thinkpad that they use to upload photos from the cameras. How does all of that equipment work fine with all the cosmic radiation floating about? With the iPhone's CPU in particular, shouldn't random bit flips be causing constant crashes due to errors? Or is it simply that these errors happen but nothing really detects them so the execution continues unhindered?
They’re not mission-critical equipment. If they fail, nobody dies.
They’re not radiation hardened, so given enough time, they’d be expected to fail. Rebooting them might clear the issue or it might not (soft vs hard faults).
Also impossible to predict when a failure would happen, but NASA, ESA and others have data somewhere that makes them believe the risk is high enough that mission critical systems need this level of redundancy.