Hacker News Reader

I would imagine you could reuse code from a flying drone on Earth.

There's no reason to assume that code would contain fewer bugs.

Next time they need to send up gps sats to orbit Mars...

visual odometry is a fairly common feature for earth-creations (even toy drones) operating in GPS-denied environments.

We have plenty of faux-mars environments to practice these techniques on. NASA even has their own.

many of the toy indoor-use drones use such techniques for attitude/altitude-hold features when under a roof.