The last POWER1 on Mars is dead

The Opportunity Rover, also known as the Mars Exploration Rover B (or MER-1), has finally been declared at end of mission today after 5,352 Mars solar days when NASA was not successfully able to re-establish contact. It had been apparently knocked off-line by a dust storm and was unable to restart either due to power loss or some other catastrophic failure. Originally intended for a 90 Mars solar day mission, its mission became almost 60 times longer than anticipated and it traveled nearly 30 miles on the surface in total. Spirit, or MER-2, its sister unit, had previously reached end of mission in 2010. And why would we report that here? Because Opportunity and Spirit were both in fact powered by the POWER1, or more accurately a 20MHz BAE RAD6000, a radiation-hardened version of the original IBM RISC Single Chip CPU and the indirect ancestor of the PowerPC 601. There are a lot of POWER chips in space, both with the original RAD6000 and its successor the RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC G3. What an awesome little tidbit of information about these Mars rovers, which I'm assuming everybody holds in high regard as excellent examples of human ingenuety and engineering.