alt Hacker NewsThe threat of radiation is not overblown at all.
The errors caused by radiation are extremely frequent and you definitely must guard against them, otherwise anything will fail immediately in space.
However that does not necessarily require hardware measures. It may be more efficient if instead of a slow antique CPU with hardware redundancy you use a fast modern CPU, even if it is more sensitive to radiation and even when it lacks hardware redundancy, but you do each computation several times, verifying that every time you get the same result, and if possible you use different algorithms or verification methods, to be able to detect some permanent errors.
This is what the Mars helicopter did. If it had used standard smartphone software, the helicopter would have failed instantly.
>>The errors caused by radiation are extremely frequent and you definitely must guard against them, otherwise anything will fail immediately in space.
I asked this in another thread but I will repeat it here - how come that their bog standard iPhones that they use for taking pictures with are still operating fine then? If like you said, "anything will fail immediately" - doesn't sound like that's the case? They have electronic watches with no radiation hardening, they have regular laptops with no radiation hardening.....I'm not saying that it's not a problem, but it definitely doesn't seem to be in the area of "immediately failing in space" if you don't have that.