Mars copter, Qualcomm chip, set to fly
Snapdragon Flight platform, built for drones and robots on Earth, is powering Ingenuity’s first controlled flight
Sunday is likely to be a long night for Qualcomm’s Dev Singh and Chris Pruetting.
Shortly after midnight Pacific Time, mission control specialists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena expect to learn whether the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter completed the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft ever on another planet.
The silicon controlling navigation, stability, cameras and other functions on Ingenuity comes from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 processor — the same chip found in the Samsung Galaxy S5 and other Android smartphones back in 2014-15.
Singh, general manager of robotics, drones and intelligent machines, and Pruetting, a senior director in the government technologies group, will be anxiously waiting for news about whether this maiden flight was successful, and how the company’s processor performed.
“We’ll try to stay awake and celebrate,” said Singh. “The moment is going to be historic. It’s like the Wright Brothers’ moment. The way that future space exploration is going to be profoundly impacted by this is exciting to even think about.”
Ingenuity — or “The Little 4 Pounder” — will begin a series of pre-flight tests on Sunday evening. If everything checks out, the drone will attempt to hover about 10 feet above the surface for 30 seconds in this initial flight.
Qualcomm’s silicon will help en
sure that the drone remains level and in the middle of its 33-by-33-foot airfield by analyzing feeds from onboard cameras and other gear. Ingenuity then will descend and touch back down — sending data to the Perseverance Rover in the first of a handful of possible test flights over the next month.
It will take a while for that data to make its way back to Earth. NASA’s JPL lab expects to receive the first transmissions at 1:15 a.m. Pacific Time Monday morning.
NASA TV will air live coverage starting at 12:30 a.m. The event also will be available on the agency’s website, and on social media platforms, including the JPL YouTube and Facebook channels.
Work on the Ingenuity helicopter began six years ago when engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena tackled the tricky problem of building an aircraft that was very light yet powerful enough to fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere, which has 1 percent of the density of Earth’s atmosphere.
That means the rotor blades must spin very fast to keep Ingenuity aloft, basically operating in turbo mode all the time.
“Some visionaries at JPL said the only way we’re going to get there is commercial technology,” said Pruetting.
“Twenty-year-old parts that JPL and NASA are using might work fine for the rover. But it is not going to work with some of the size, weight and power constraints implied by the helicopter fitting into the underbelly of Perseverance.”
Ingenuity arrived at Mars on Feb. 18, attached to the Perseverance rover. On March 21 Ingenuity detached from the rover. It has been charging batteries via solar panels, operating heating and other systems, as well as communicating back to NASA/JPL since then without a hitch.
This initial flight will be fully autonomous. It takes too long for signals from Earth to reach Mars to control the aircraft in flight. So, the heavy lifting for navigation and other functions will be handled by Qualcomm’s processor.
If this demonstration is successful, Singh believes drones could become an important tool in exploring the Red Planet and others.
“Not only is it going to cover a lot more ground, but it’s also going to get a different perspective,” said Singh. “The intent of Mars exploration is to find life. The helicopter could be a great scout to guide the rover where it needs to go. And in the future when astronauts are going there, they could be led by drones ahead of them.”