Where does this come from, and can I check it?

An energetic particle striking silicon can invert a stored value, an effect called a single event upset. The figure is taken from NASA, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

Is this really a technology fact?

Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

A cosmic ray can flip a bit in memory

An energetic particle striking silicon can invert a stored value, an effect called a single event upset Particles from cosmic ray showers reach sea level and become far more numerous at aircraft cruising altitude. A strike near a memory cell can change its state without damaging the chip, so servers use error correcting memory to catch and repair it. The same mechanism can upset logic in flight computers, which is why spacecraft carry radiation hardened parts. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

NASA

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Flash cells wear out after a few thousand erasesNAND must be erased a whole block at a time, so controllers spread writes across spare blocks to even the damage Dynamic RAM DRAM was invented by Robert Dennard at IBM in 1966DRAM uses a single transistor and capacitor per memory bit to store digital data Magnetic core memory served as main RAM for computers from the 1950s to 1970sTiny ferrite rings threaded on wire grids stored magnetic bits non-volatilesly The first stored program ran on the Manchester BabyIn June 1948 a small experimental machine executed 52 instructions held in a cathode ray tube memory Virtual memory first worked on the Atlas computerThe Manchester Atlas, running in 1962, gave programs an address space larger than the machine's real memory Processors keep small caches to hide memory delaysA cache hit costs a few nanoseconds while main memory takes about a hundred, so chips copy nearby data first

Tags: radiation, memory, reliability

A cosmic ray can flip a bit in memory: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: An energetic particle striking silicon can invert a stored value, an effect called a single event upset. The figure is taken from NASA, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.