Wonderful
This is what happens when Science is not bogged down by Politics.
I applaud the people at NASA who have endlessly proven over the decades that they can always make the best out of the most difficult situations.
NASA repurposes Mars Helicopter’s ancient Snapdragon SoC to help Perseverance rover navigate
NASA has revealed it repurposed the processor the Perseverance rover used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, to help the rolling robot navigate the Red Planet autonomously “for potentially unlimited distances.” The aerospace agency revealed the hack last week in a post that says it used the rover’s Helicopter …
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Monday 23rd February 2026 09:43 GMT Caver_Dave
Re: Wonderful
Having work directly or indirectly with the 3 groups, I would say the main difference is not the engineers, but having a defined goal and letting the engineers get on with it without too much top-down interference. Plus timescales and working hours that do not induce 2 year burn out!
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Monday 23rd February 2026 22:27 GMT DS999
Re: Wonderful
This wasn't a financial budget limitation, it was a power budget limitation. They could easily afford better ARM cores all around (which would have cost a few thousand dollars extra of a budget measured in the billions) to perform roles within the lander, but power is at a premium so they only got lower power cores to perform the required functions.
Now that they have this resource (and more importantly its power budget) sitting idle they are thinking of ways they can use it to improve over the "required function" done by those lesser cores installed elsewhere.
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Thursday 5th March 2026 17:31 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Wonderful
It's arguable that the McBoing merger was the end of the beginning of the bankers' takeover of Boeing.
Beancounters had been in charge since restructuring in 1971 - the B747-100 gamble bankrupted the company. That the engneers managed to hold out for so long underscores how strong the engineering ethos had been.
Boeing's unionbusting behaviour has badly backfired on them. Non-union labour in North Carolina and Kansas is turning out rotten quality thanks to poor training and line managers ordering workers to bodge substandard parts (in some cases fishing parts from reject bins and ordering they be used anyway). Meantime it's proving incredibly difficult to hire new talent in Washington thanks to the pension schemes having been gutted - something that Manglement did a lot of mutual circle jerking about at the time despite being warned this is exactly what would happen.
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Tuesday 24th February 2026 21:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lovely
Hmm. Not everyone there.
Before Ingenuity ever landed on Mars, scientists almost managed to kill it
Eric Berger – 12 Feb 2024
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Monday 23rd February 2026 10:17 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Clever !
Imagination and Creativity.
The critical insight I guess was that the terrain (areain?) maps which I assume were used for the helicoptor's navigation, could be used by any vehicle passing through the terrain, including the rover itself.
Although I would think the process is closer to the terrain following radar that fighters and cruise missiles use(d), than the GPS.
I suppose the rover's main systems were older tried·and·tested hardware which, while reliable, would be much lower spec and performance than that deployed in the frankly experimental Ingenuity helicopter.
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Monday 23rd February 2026 12:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I suppose ...
Correct.
To be properly radiation hardened you need the device geometries to be of a reasonable size (and multiple other more technical issues). This precludes much of the very modern technology.
Whilst some physical protection can be placed around the SnapDragon it is much more likely to be zapped by a stray cosmic ray - indeed some of the memory has been, but apparently the processor is still OK.
This is quite remarkable considering the number of Single Event Upsets that can be seen on Transatlantic flights that go near the North Pole.
The stuff that just has to run on the rover is running on VxWorks, but again it is remarkable that the helicopter is running a hardened versions on Linux. (Wind River management no bid porting VxWorks to the SnapDragon.)
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