NASA engineers reprogrammed Mars helicopter’s Snapdragon chip to run the rover instead, reconfiguring system from 140 million miles away — repurposes its ‘ancie

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NASA engineers reprogrammed Mars helicopter's Snapdragon chip to run the rover instead, reconfiguring system from 140 million miles away — repurposes its 'ancie

The "ancient" Snapdragon 801 chip for mid-range smartphones is still powerful enough to give the rover accurate directions.

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The space agency fixed this with an ingenious method involving the use of its panoramic cameras, satellite information of the surface of the red planet, and an unused chip from the rover. Perseverance's Helicopter Base Station is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, which it previously used to communicate with the rover. But since the chopper was retired in 2024, the chip has remained idle and unused. So, NASA engineers decided to repurpose it to help Perseverance find where it is to an accuracy of about 10 inches.

What the rover would do is to take panoramic photos of its surroundings. It would then feed the data to the SoC and convert it into a bird’s eye view of its surroundings, after which it would compare that with satellite terrain maps taken from orbiting spacecraft. By matching the converted 360-degree photo with overhead images from the satellite, it can then pinpoint its exact location on the planet’s surface. NASA calls this technology Mars Global Localization, and it serves as a substitute for GPS without requiring a constellation of 24 satellites.

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“This is kind of like giving the rover GPS. Now it can determine its own location on Mars,” said Vandi Verma of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It means the rover will be able to drive for much longer distances autonomously, so we’ll explore more of the planet and get more science. And it could be used by almost any other rover traveling fast and far.”

Although this isn’t the first time that NASA engineers worked at planetary distances, it still remains an astounding feat to be able to successfully reprogram a spacecraft while being hundreds of millions of miles away from it. This is exactly what the space agency achieved when its Voyager 1 spacecraft, which launched in 1977, encountered an error in deep space. When its memory module finally failed after traveling for over 45 years , the engineers were able to devise a way to bypass the errant chip and continue operating the spacecraft. And, as of late 2025, it has now reached one light-day — meaning it takes 24 hours to send commands to the probe, and another 24 hours to receive a response — making it the farthest man-made object from Earth.

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