Should you thought your new Android smartphone isn’t already innovative, you’d be very improper. In reality, likelihood is, your new Android cellphone, significantly if you happen to’ve splurged on a flagship cellphone, is extra highly effective than a number of the tech that has landed on Mars lately. The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover which landed on the pink planet earlier this month carries with it the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, an autonomous drone. This drone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, basically the Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight iteration that drives the Qualcomm Robotics Flight 801 platform. It has its personal little essential mission on the planet.
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter isn’t really a part of the Perseverance’s mission however is on an experimental 30 Martian day take a look at flight, that’s 31 days right here on earth, in temperatures that drop as little as minus 130 levels Fahrenheit, which is minus 90 levels Celsius. If this take a look at is profitable, NASA will plan one other take a look at flight within the coming months. The Snapdragon Flight platform was introduced again in 2015, and the core specs embrace a 2.26GHz processor in addition to two cameras—one is a downward-facing 0.5-megapixel navigation digital camera that maps the Martian floor whereas there’s a 13-megapixel entrance dealing with digital camera that offers it better consciousness. And people superior images of Mars, that we’ll finally see.
There’s so much that this platform has to do as a part of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter checks, in what are most positively very testing situations. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter must perceive the temperature and maintain the internals heat, make sure the batteries are topped up, monitor the blades and motors to make sure they don’t freeze and fly in addition to land autonomously. In case you want a refresher, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chip powered a number of the common Android flagship telephones up to now, together with the OnePlus One, the HTC One M8 and the Samsung Galaxy S5—across the years 2014 and 2015. Since then, we now have seen the varied upgrades, particularly the Snapdragon 805, Snapdragon 808, Snapdragon 810, Snapdragon 820, Snapdragon 821, Snapdragon 835, Snapdragon 845, Snapdragon 855 and Snapdragon 855+, Snapdragon 865 and Snapdragon 865+ in addition to the newest Snapdragon 888. And at every step, your computing units together with Android smartphones, have turns into considerably extra highly effective.
Curiously sufficient, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover runs what can solely be described as a lot older specs and structure. It runs the BAE RAD 750 radiation-hardened processor with 256MB RAM and 2GB of storage. This PowerPC 750 structure delivers as much as 200Mhz clock speeds. These specs can be much like an Apple iMac from 1998 or a PowerBook G3 from that period.
