NASA engineers reprogrammed Mars helicopter's Snapdragon chip to run the rover instead, reconfiguring system from 140 million miles away — repurposes its 'ancient' unused Qualcomm 801 SoC, accurate to within 10 inches

Perseverance rover on Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been running into issues with its autonomous navigation systems on Mars, wherein its systems required guidance from Earth to determine its precise location. While its onboard systems can determine the general area where it’s at, it still needs guidance from human controllers to avoid dangerous terrain. This did not prevent Perseverance from exploring the red planet, but it has seriously hampered its autonomous range. That’s because even though communication between the two planets usually takes about 24 minutes on average, NASA said that it can only phone home once a day to know where exactly it is.