February 23, 2026
Find My Rover: Mars Edition
NASA uses Mars Helicopter's SoC for rover navigation upgrade
Phone chip becomes Mars GPS; commenters feud over radiation, power, and '100 rovers'
TLDR: NASA repurposed a built‑in “phone chip” from the helicopter link to give Perseverance near‑GPS self‑navigation, reducing Earth check‑ins. Comments split between radiation worries, a power‑budget reality check dunking on “use Tesla chips,” and calls for swarms of cheap rovers—smart reuse means more science.
NASA just MacGyvered Mars. With the Ingenuity helicopter grounded after 72 flights, engineers repurposed the rover’s built‑in “helicopter radio” computer — basically an old Android‑era phone chip — to help Perseverance find itself on the Red Planet. It matches rover photos to satellite maps to nail its location within about 10 inches in roughly two minutes, meaning longer, smarter autonomous drives and fewer 40‑minute waits to “call home.” JPL’s Vandi Verma called it “like giving the rover GPS,” and the system is already working. Cue the comments section fireworks.
First in: the doom bell. “Those CPUs aren’t radiation hardened,” warned one user, predicting cosmic‑ray carnage. Immediately, a clapback: the chip is already inside the rover — they didn’t ship a new one to Mars — and the helicopter’s dead, so why not reuse it? Practicality: 1, panic: 0. Then came the big dreamers, imagining “a hundred” cheap bots roaming Mars in a LoRa (long‑range radio) mesh — a sci‑fi swarm for not much more money. The hottest dunk? A brutal takedown of “just use Tesla chips”: the rover runs on about 110 watts total, so power‑hungry car silicon would be a battery‑draining tantrum.
Meanwhile, jokes flew: “Find My Rover” updates, “Snapdragon works harder on Mars than my phone,” and “No bars on Mars, still gets GPS.” Nerds nodded at the clever workarounds for a few bad memory bits. More science, less sitting idle — the internet actually agreed on that part. Read more at NASA and The Register.
Key Points
- •NASA repurposed Perseverance’s Helicopter Base Station Snapdragon 801 processor to run a Mars Global Localization algorithm.
- •The algorithm compares panoramic navcam images with onboard orbital terrain maps and fixes location in ~2 minutes within about 25 cm.
- •This upgrade enables longer autonomous drives without contacting Earth, addressing previous localization drift up to 35 meters.
- •The HBS system runs Linux; specs include 2.26GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, and 32GB flash; it is about 100x faster than rover’s other computers.
- •Engineers found and isolated damage to ~25 memory bits and added cross-checks with the main computer; the system was used on Feb 2 and 16.