NASA repurposes Mars helicopter Snapdragon chip to boost Perseverance navigation
Feb 24th 2026
Engineers reprogrammed an idle Snapdragon 801 from the retired Ingenuity helicopter base station to run Mars Global Localization, letting Perseverance self-locate to roughly 10 inches by matching panoramic photos to orbital maps.
- An unused Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC from Ingenuity's base station was reprogrammed to assist the Perseverance rover.
- Perseverance takes 360 degree panoramic images, converts them to bird's eye views, and the chip compares those views to orbital terrain maps.
- The Mars Global Localization technique yields location accuracy of about 10 inches without a GPS satellite network.
- The upgrade increases the rover's autonomous driving range by reducing dependence on daily position updates from Earth.
- Engineers uploaded and tested the new software remotely despite one way signal delays of roughly 24 minutes.