If you have ever put a floppy disc drive through a baggage x-ray machine and found all your data corrupted, you would be aware of the major damage that radiation can do to a computer. Of course nowadays the equipment is constructed with special protection for the levels of radiation that a computer or other hardware devices may encounter in a baggage check.

What about radiation in outer space? Won’t that affect the computers on board the space crafts? Yes it will, and that’s why electronics need to be protected in space. For this reason extra shielding which prevents the harmful rays from reaching the computer chips are every important.

In addition there is also a backup for just about every component possible so that it the first one fails, the redundant one takes over. Special radiation hardened or RedHard electronics are used from Silicon on Insulator or Silicon on Sapphire rather than the regular semiconductor  wafers. This protects the electronics a thousand times better against possible harmful radiation.

They also make the electronics reconfigurable, so that if some thing does get corrupted, the device can be shut down and rebooted. You may lose some data, but at least the electronics will begin functioning again. And new science projects constantly come up with new ways to protect the computers.