The Mars Curiosity rover late last night, but what's powering the Red Planet's latest inhabitant?

Curiosity may have traveled 352 million miles between Earth and Mars, but on the surface, it might not seem that much more powerful than the average gadget you have lying around your house.

According to NASA, Curiosity is equipped with just 2GB of flash memory (the new MacBook Air offers up 64GB, 128GB, or 265GB). However, that 2GB is eight times as much as previous Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, had on board the space agency said.

Curiosity's computer chip also got a speed boost over its younger siblings. It clocks at up to 200 megahertz, 10 times the clock of the Spirit and Opportunity computers. There's also 256MB of RAM and 256KB of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory in Curiosity's calculating engine.

If those specs sound fairly pedestrian, consider that the aforementioned Macbook probably couldn't handle the radiation on Mars. Curiosity runs a BAE RAD 750 processor, a radiation-hardened version of the IBM PowerPC 750. According to BAE, the first RAD 750 processors were used in 2005 on Deep Impact, XSS-11, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter missions. They can function at temperatures between -55 degrees and 125 degrees Celsius; Mars temperatures can go as low as -153 and as high as 20 degrees, NASA said.

The space agency also outfitted Curiosity with a "spare brain" in case its main computer fails.

"Just like the human brain, the rover computers register signs of health, temperature, and other features that keep the rover 'alive,'" NASA said. "This main control loop essentially keeps the rover 'alive' by constantly checking itself to ensure that it is both able to communicate throughout the surface mission and that it remains thermally stable (not too hot or too cold) at all times. It does so by periodically checking temperatures, particularly in the rover body, and responding to potential overheating conditions, recording power generation and power storage data throughout the Mars sol (a Martian day), and scheduling and preparing for communication sessions."

What about the back-end support for Curiosity back here on Earth?

In a blog post, Dell said it had supported the "" Curiosity landing "with data analysis conducted in two NASA High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running Dell PowerEdge servers."

The Dell HPC clusters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), dubbed Galaxy and Nebula, "provided vital support to NASA's Curiosity rover in analyzing the vast amounts of test data needed to correctly prepare the rover for entering the Martian atmosphere and landing it on the planet," Dell said. "The final landing sequence parameters developed by the mission team, which was tested and validated using the Dell HPC clusters, were uploaded last week to Curiosity."

Also in use during those tense seven minutes was the VxWorks operating system from California-based Wind River. "While on Mars, Curiosity will depend on VxWorks to perform mission-critical tasks, such as ground operations control, data collection, and Mars-to-Earth communication relay," Wind River said today.

PCMag's Meredith Popolo was at JPL this weekend covering the landing. For more, see her tweets from last nite via @mgpopolo and @PCMag. Also check out the slideshow above for shots from her recent tour of JPL.