BAE System's 500th radiation-hardened space computer has taken flight on a NASA mission to find habitable planets in the Milky Way.

The RAD750® computer aboard NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is part of the company’s 3G of radiation-hardened single-board computers. With 500 systems placed in orbit, BAE Systems is the leading provider of computers capable of withstanding the radiation, temperature, vibration, and other extremes encountered in space flight. The computer aboard the Kepler Mission controls the NASA spacecraft, managing its directional orientation and other functions, processing large volumes of scientific data, and running the software that keeps the satellite in orbit. Kepler is NASA’s first mission to determine the statistical probability of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of the Milky Way. BAE Systems has been building radiation-hardened computers since the early 1990s. The latest version, the RAD750, was developed in 2001 through a partnership among BAE Systems, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.