Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)

> Ingenuity, also called Ginny, is a small robotic helicopter operating on Mars.

> The helicopter uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor

Edit: There is a way to detect and recover from these types of errors. They appear to be able to run the computation on a number of cores with a voter to check for consistency.

Slide 41 (PDF warning): http://microelectronics.esa.int/riscv/rvws2022/presentations...




Ingenuity had a Snapdragon, but there was also a redundant pair of arm r5f microcontrollers (which are also lockstepped dual-core processors, so quadruple redundancy) where the flight controllers were, and a rad-tolerant FPGA (proasic) that watchdogged everything else. The Snapdragon was used for less critical code such as imaging and comms.

https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...


Also, thanks to the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field Mars's surface is about 50 times more radioactive than the Earth's, but it's still no as bad as space out past the Van Allen belts




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: