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Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly by birktj on Sunday February 28, 2021 @02:10PM (#26296111)
What I imagine for long lived and high-cost missions is using some sort of co-processor setup with a radiation hardened processor and a faster and more modern processor. These rovers run a lot of computer vision algorithms and I believe more powerful hardware would be quite useful. They may already do something like this, however my understanding is that there is a lot of skepticism in integrating these less fault-tolerant processors. Ingenuity could help remove some of the skepticism and lead to more systems like this in the future.
Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly by GimbalLock on Sunday February 28, 2021 @11:06PM (#26299605)
You’re not far off. The Snapdragon is monitored by some more radiation tolerant hardware (FPGA if I recall correctly).

Great talk about it from the FSW Workshop in 2019.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mQu9m4MG5Gc

Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly by numpad0 on Sunday February 28, 2021 @09:10PM (#26299003)
Do keep in mind that radiation cause permanent damages at predictable paces... I don’t understand why online discussions like this fails to address permanent damages. You can’t reset burnt chips.
Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly by alexvoda on Sunday February 28, 2021 @05:02PM (#26297522)
I wonder if it wouldn't have been possible to do this on Perseverance too. After Ingenuitys mission is done they could have lugged it arround for extra processing power for as long as it survives. I doubt the extra weight causes that much extra energy consumption.

The software stack is probably not ready for that since the plan is to abandon it after its mission. And the Zigbee protocol is rather limmited.