Mars Rover Finally Gets GPS for Mars (Sort of), One Step Closer to Autonomous Planetary Exploration – Jalopnik

Do you ever lose connection with GPS? Sometimes you’re in a tunnel, sometimes your phone doesn’t work, and sometimes you’re a robot explorer on another planet, hundreds of millions of miles away from the nearest positioning satellite. Yes, NASA’s Mars rovers, triumphs of engineering and technology, have no idea where they are. Although their on-board computers are smart enough to navigate around terrain and obstacles, they don’t know exactly where they’ve ended up after a day of driving. But now, thanks to a little ingenuity (literally), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has figured out how to get the Perseverance rover to understand where it is on Mars. It’s a kind of GPS of Mars, and it’s called Mars Global Localization.

It’s all about navigating based on landmarks. NASA has mapped every inch of Mars, so positioning involves the rover looking for geological features and then comparing that to the distance the rover has traveled. Older rovers had to stop and process this information, but the Perseverance rover was able to do this on the move with a system called AutoNav. But as NASA explainsThis method isn’t perfect, and as the day goes on the rover becomes less and less confident that it understands its location. Eventually, the nervous little rover becomes so insecure that he goes into “ask for help” mode, freezes in place and calls Mom, or in this case JPL. Along with its plea, it sends a panoramic image, which JPL engineers use to pinpoint an exact location. They send that information back to the rover, which can now move on.

Over years and even decades, that phone tag can slow down exploration significantly. It would be much better if the rover could actually think for itself. So just as a teenager must eventually learn to figure out their own problems, JPL wanted to find a way to let the rover orient itself. Finally they found one of something that wasn’t designed for it.

So a success (helicopter drone on Mars!) that was a failure (he broke his rotor!) and yet a success (72 missions!). But Ingenuity’s failure has inadvertently opened the door to another success. You see, Mars is a hostile environment, constantly bombarded by solar radiation. So the microchips that make up Perseverance’s brain need to be hardened, which in itself is an engineering feat. That, in turn, means those chips are quite old, because it takes a long time to figure out how to harden them. Just like in Perseverance, it runs on chips from 1997. Don’t worry, you can get Windows 98 soon!

Here’s the trick: Perseverance needed a separate chip to talk to Ingenuity. And since Ingenuity was only going to make five flights anyway, why bother with a hardened chip? So for that, the rover had a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoCa chip made mainly for smartphones and first released in 2013. That may seem like an old processor, but it’s not 1997 old. Someone at JPL finally realized that that’s a lot of computing power that Perseverance is simply not using now that Ingenuity is no longer flying. Why not use it to think?

Of course, this unhardened chip won’t last forever. NASA’s level of accuracy is such that through careful analysis it has determined that the Snapdragon has already suffered damage to 25 of its processing bits. Personally, I would be very upset if 25 of my bits were damaged. But Perseverance lived up to its name, isolated the damage and continued navigating. However, expect the damage to increase over time.

This is all still new, but this should open up some exciting new routes for NASA and other rover operators in the future. If more modern chips can be installed, rovers will be able to go much further under their own guidance, requiring less and less direct supervision from human engineers on Earth. That will be a key technology for any moon bases that might appear in the near future.