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New Horizons Used A Playstation CPU To Fly By Pluto

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The PlayStation 4 may be the latest and greatest video game console, but the chip from the original PlayStation has gone where no video game console has gone before: To Pluto.

According to The Verge, the CPU from the original Sony video game console was used in NASA's New Horizons space probe, that just did a flyby of the distant planet*.

The MIPS R3000 CPU was repurposed in 2006 by the space agency to "fire thrusters, monitor sensors, and transmit data." Now it's traveled 3.6 billion miles through space. That's a distance so vast, it's pretty much impossible to grasp the enormity of it by just reading a sentence. (I recommend using this visualization of the distance between planets. The graph scales everything to the moon if it were one pixel. Pluto is even smaller than the moon.)

According to The Verge, NASA prefers reliability over power---and what's more tried and true than a CPU used in millions of PlayStation consoles?

The PlayStation launched in 1994. It was the first video game console to sell over 100 million units, though the PS2 sold even more. NASA is also making use of other video game technology such as the Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens for various space programs.

The New Horizons spacecraft has come closer to Pluto than we've ever been before, and it turns out the little planet is actually a pretty fascinating place. Scientists have even discovered that it's quite likely a geologically active planet.

*As a side-note, I live just a couple miles away from the Lowell Observatory where Pluto was first discovered in 1930 by Clyde W. Tombaugh. As such, I will always refer to the little celestial body as a proper planet, not a dwarf planet. For more on the chip and its use in the fly by, check out this post.

 

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