NASA uses Mars Helicopter's SoC for rover navigation upgrade(www.theregister.com)
39 pointsby LorenDB4 hours ago4 comments
  • mapt2 hours ago
    This system sounds like one of the many pieces of science equipment whose costs are >98% in one-off R&D engineering & mission ops, and <2% in marginal cost of construction/launch.

    Imagine a hundred of these exploring Mars semi-autonomously, maybe with LoRa mesh networking, for not a whole lot more money than it cost to send one.

  • 1970-01-012 hours ago
    So 100% of the Snapdragons on Mars are no longer sitting idle and are tasked doing useful work. Why can't we do the same for Earth?
  • tibbydudeza3 hours ago
    Those CPU's are not radiation hardened.
    • adrian_b3 hours ago
      As TFA says, they are running the algorithm multiple times and they check that the results match, to guard against transient errors caused by radiation.

      The permanent errors caused by radiation must be identified by periodic self tests. When the permanent damage is in a redundant structure, e.g. as mentioned in TFA when they find some memory bits that are permanently damaged, they must avoid using what is damaged.

      Eventually radiation will destroy something that is essential, but until then the Snapdragon CPU should be usable.

    • sillywalk21 minutes ago
      It looks like the FPGA that monitors/controls the redundant/lockstep CPUs might be radiation tolerant. From [0]:

      "..the critical FPGA which is always on for the duration of the mission, the radiation tolerant ProASIC3 is chosen with the military temperature grade (-55 C to 125 C) and -1 speed grade to mitigate the degradation in the propagation delay caused by the total dose radiation. The single-event upset (SEU) is mitigated with triple module redundancy (TMR) in the FPGA design.

      ...

      The FPGA device is a military-grade version of MicroSemi’s ProASIC3L, which uses the same silicon as the radiation-tolerant device from the same family."[0]

      The specs from [1] say there is also a specific radiation-tolerant variant.

      So it looks like the CPUs themselves have dual lock-stepped cores, and the CPU checks for errors each cycle. If there's an error it flags the FPGA, which switches to the other CPU.

      [0] https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...

      [1] https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/F...

    • wongarsu2 hours ago
      Yeah, that's kind of awesome, isn't it?

      Flying a helicopter on Mars was inspiring and useful for scouting, etc. But maybe the best thing coming out of it is undeniable proof that off-the-shelf hardware without radiation hardening is perfectly viable on Mars if you can just reboot it fast enough

      • adrian_b39 minutes ago
        Off-the-shelf hardware is usable, but instead of smartphone CPUs one must use the so-called AE (automotive-enhanced) variants of the same ARM cores that have been used in smartphones.

        The automotive variants allow the use of multiple redundant cores, which check each other for errors. This would allow a much better performance than NASA gets today from a Snapdragon, due to being forced to run multiple times each computation, then to verify that the same results have obtained.

        There are off-the-shelf redundant CPUs of this kind, designed for use in cars and other vehicles, i.e. for a goal much closer of what NASA needs than smartphone CPUs.

        The design of the electronics for the Mars helicopter was a very low-effort project, because too many people were skeptical about its chances of success. In other circumstances, it could have been done much better.

  • __patchbit__3 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • amluto2 hours ago
      Even ignoring the general absurdity of this: no, Tesla’s chips would not be good options. The entire nominal power budget of Perseverance is 110W. It cannot run a Tesla chip unless it discharges a battery to do so, and there is no benefit to doing short unsustainable bursts of calculation instead of slower, more efficient calculation. If you want to propose some ridiculous repurposing of tech from a cool company, it might be a better idea to stick a MacBook [0] on the rover.

      Realistically, if Perseverance wanted an off-the-shelf “AI” chip, something from the Jetson series would make more sense.

      [0] Air, not Pro. The Pro’s fan would perform to spec on Mars :)

    • gavinsyancey2 hours ago
      How do you propose to install them in the rover, which is already on Mars? The helicopter base station CPU is already in the rover, since it was included to communicate with the helicopter. And it's no longer needed for that purpose, since the helicopter crashed and broke a propeller.