The CPU From the Original PlayStation Guided New Horizons to Pluto

You won’t believe which CPU powers the New Horizons probe that flew by Pluto. The same one as the 1994 Playstation.

An artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. (Photo: Reuters)

We’ve all heard that our smartphones have more powerful processing speeds than the missions that NASA sent to the moon in the mid-20th century, almost 50 years ago.

But did you know that New Horizons, the space probe that just survived a flyby of Pluto after travelling 4.88 billion km over 9 years, is powered by the same processor used in the original Sony PlayStation 1 when it was launched in 1994.

(Photo Courtesy: Evan-Amos)

New Horizons is powered by a MIPS-based Mongoose-V chip clocking in at 12 MHz. Mongoose-V is a radiation-hardened version of the MIPS R3000 CPU and is manufactured by Synova, a Florida-based company.

So effectively, after powering machines that enabled people to virtually visit alien worlds two decades ago, the chip is now powering one of humanity’s greatest space exploration endeavours into unexplored Space.

Of course, the chip has been tweaked a little to survive the harsh conditions of Space. But NASA scientists have time and again shown a preference for reliability over power.

For example, Orion, NASA’s next-generation deep space vehicle commissioned to eventually fly to Mars, is powered by a 13 year old IBM processor that’s perhaps as good as the one on your smartphone.