Remember the old anecdote about how Nintendo's Game Boy had more computing power than the system NASA used to land Apollo 11 on the moon? The Perseverance Mars rover appears to be in a similar situation.

Perseverance may be the most advanced Mars rover ever built, but it is running on the same PowerPC750 processor that powered the iMac in 1998. In other words, your smartphone has more computing power than a robot that just landed on another planet.

You might think NASA could have done better, but according to New Scientist, NASA could not have used something newer like Apple's M1 chip. This is because Mars is a different planet, and what works on Earth may not necessarily work on Mars.

The main question is how the atmospheres of the two planets block radiation and other charged particles. Mars, like outer space, is not as protected as Earth, so one bad burst of radiation could fry the electronics of a modern processor. [NASA cannot replace the electronics if something goes wrong. Therefore, not only does Perseverance have a backup computer (plus a third for image analysis), but its processors have been specially designed to withstand the harsh Martian environment.

Instead of the standard consumer-grade PowerPC750 chip, it is an improved version called the RAD750 chip. This chip is enhanced against radiation and has been used several times in NASA's recent history. The Curiosity rover, the Fermi space telescope, the Kepler telescope, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are just a few examples of NASA machines equipped with the RAD750.

Also, don't tear apart your old iMac trying to build your own extraterrestrial probe, as they cost over $200,000 per chip. You don't have the $3 billion needed to transport it to Mars anyway.

The RAD750 may only offer a 200 MHz clock speed and 2 GB of flash memory, but it is still far more powerful than the rovers that arrived on Mars before Curiosity. It may sound laughable compared to the power of your iPhone 12, but your iPhone 12 will not last very long on the surface of Mars.

Perseverance is now almost two weeks into its month-long mission, and it is clear that the RAD750 is doing a pretty good job. Curiosity, on the other hand, has been on the Red Planet since 2012 and is still going strong. It is clear that the apparent underpowering of these chips is not a particularly big problem.