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There's a piece of gaming history at the heart of NASA's Pluto spacecraft

In 2006, NASA launched a spacecraft named New Horizons with an eye toward the dwarf planet Pluto.

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Nine years later, it's taking gorgeous photos of Pluto, its moons, and other, mostly cold stuff in the region (known as the Kuiper Belt). Like this:

And this:

Good framing, NASA spacecraft!

Anyway, apparently all these gorgeous photos are enabled by a spacecraft that's powered by the same chip that powered the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Really!

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A gorgeous panorama of the surface of Pluto, care of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
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A false-color image of Pluto, as seen by NASA's New Horizons mission in July 2015. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
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The chip is known as the "MIPS R3000," and it's still used today in stuff like server stacks and workstations, according to the company that's still making MIPS chips. It's also known for powering the hot moves of "Crash Bandicoot" and burning rubber of "Twisted Metal." We'll spare you all the dry technical details, but there's one that's especially great:

The CPU of choice for New Horizons is a MIPS-based Mongoose-V chip clocked at a whopping 12 MHz. Mongoose-V is a radiation-hardened version of the MIPS R3000 CPU and is manufactured by Synova, a Florida-based company that specializes in turnkey aeronautics solutions.

So that's basically saying that the New Horizons spacecraft is powered, computationally speaking, by an aging processor that's been "radiation-hardened" for use in space. Which is to say: no, unfortunately, your old original PlayStation probably wouldn't survive in space all by itself. Unless you've been radiation-hardening it? Here's hoping you're not.

Gaming Space NASA
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