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| Cosmic rays come from outer space - NASA |
Cosmic rays can raise havoc with your automobile by messing up the
computer chip's that control your car’s functions including the computer chip
that makes that controls your speed. It is possible that this is the cause of so many
recalls in the past because the automobile manufacturers are not familiar with the
effect of cosmic rays on their computer chips.
This may not be as crazy as it sounds because cosmic radiation
has been known to wreck havoc on many computer chips. There are scientists that
think this might be one cause of unintended acceleration and many other
problems that car owners have been reporting since last year when the
automaker's had to recall more than 7.7 million cars, The engineers who are
investigating this problem are still trying to figure out the cause.
This has even been brought to the attention of the federal
government who is beginning to take this possibility seriously. This was after
a tip they received suggesting the design of one manufacturer’s chips, processors
and software could cause them to be especially vulnerable to the effects of
cosmic radiation.
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| A sports car with its hood open Photo by Greg Gjerdingen |
According to a survey taken by USA Today finds that speed
control problems are the most mentioned by owner’s complaints to
authorities. One manufacture, Toyota
is not alone in facing this threat; today electronic components are playing an
ever-increasing role in controlling our cars, so realistically this could
happen to any car.
According to one source, a researcher at TRIUMF, a cyclotron
located in Vancouver , British
Columbia Toyota
and other automobile manufacturers doing about this problem of cosmic rays for
finding a correction.
It is entirely possible that the high-energy particles found
in cosmic rays can cause a glitch or alter a signal passing through a computer
chip. This is called a single event upset that can be anything from loss of data
to a function being corrupted. A circuit that is designed to carry out an
innocent action may be reprogrammed by one of these particles to do something
that its manufacture never intended, like sudden acceleration.
The author owns a different brand of car, then underwent a sudden
acceleration while waiting in line for the traffic to move. Before he could
stop the car it had already smashed into the car in front of it, fortunately
causing no damage, except that the driver of the other car became quite upset.
References:
Cosmic Ray, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray
