One of the recurrent Internet memes since the successful landing of the Curiosity Mars rover has been that the iPhone has more processing power than the computer onboard the rover. It's true -- but some of the numbers touted in the rush of blog posts have been flawed. Let's take a closer look at Curiosity's computing power versus the iPhone 4S.
First of all, just about every post I've seen so far neglects to point out that Curiosity has two identical computers, each called a Rover Compute Element or RCE. Of course, it only uses one at a time; the other is configured as a live backup that will take over the tasks of navigation, control, and communications if the other has problems. Does your iPhone 4S have a backup compute
