IEEE Spectrum: “How NASA designed a Helicopter that could fly autonomously on Mars”

Tim Canham: Since Ingenuity is classified as a technology demo, JPL is willing to accept more risk. The main unmanned projects like rovers and deep space explorers are what’s called Class B missions, in which there are many people working on ruggedized hardware and software over many years. With a technology demo, JPL is willing to try new ways of doing things. So we essentially went out and used a lot of off-the-shelf consumer hardware.

There are some avionics components that are very tough and radiation resistant, but much of the technology is commercial grade. The processor board that we used, for instance, is a Snapdragon 801, which is manufactured by Qualcomm. It’s essentially a cell phone class processor, and the board is very small. But ironically, because it’s relatively modern technology, it’s vastly more powerful than the processors that are flying on the rover. We actually have a couple of orders of magnitude more computing power than the rover does, because we need it. Our guidance loops are running at 500 Hz in order to maintain control in the atmosphere that we're flying in. And on top of that, we’re capturing images and analyzing features and tracking them from frame to frame at 30 Hz, and so there’s some pretty serious computing power needed for that. And none of the avionics that NASA is currently flying are anywhere near powerful enough. In some cases we literally ordered parts from SparkFun [Electronics]. Our philosophy was, this is commercial hardware, but we’ll test it, and if it works well, we’ll use it.

Evan Ackerman

Interesting background on NASA’s most recent mission to Mars, particularly the large gap in computing power between the processors installed on the Perseverance rover and on the Ingenuity helicopter. It highlights the fast and steady pace of consumer chip technology, with updates coming yearly, in contrast to the long and laborious process of planning and executing a space mission (Perseverance was announced eight years ago). Hopefully NASA and other space agencies can accelerate this process, or at least combine large and complex missions with smaller and more flexible experiments, such as this first Martian drone.

In this artist’s concept, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter stands on the Red Planet’s surface as NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover (partially visible on the left) rolls away Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech