Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncw96 | Hacker News Reader

The helicopter, Ingenuity, that went to Mars with Perseverance uses a (somewhat) more modern Snapdragon 801 processor.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/aerospace/robotic-explor...

Ingenuity is also basically disposable. If it has a complete failure there is no critical mission tasks that are blocked or interrupted. When the device is basically a bonus-time test with a fixed weight limit then you can take a lot more risks to pack more into that weight if you accept a reasonably high probability of failure.

They probably also expect to learn something from the failure. If this is a more modern chip that is testing it's radiation hardening, this is a good place to put it in trial run. If it fails, they get new information, if it succeeds they now have a successful flight with it to Mars and some data.

It's a great 2 for 1 thing that NASA typically does. They'll win even when they fail because they learned something and they won't fail that way again.

It also reboots itself quite regularly because they're worried about radiation failures.

I remember reading that it only takes a couple milliseconds to reboot so they're not worried about it moving very far while they do.

There's some surprisingly powerful rad-hardened ARM cpus out there. I'm surprised they didn't go in that direction.

And the camera system uses an Intel processor running Linux and FFmpeg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com