"The fundamental elements of generative AI are showing a lot of promise in streamlining the pillars of autonomous navigation for off-planet driving."

What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.

NASA quietly let a Mars rover think for itself in December 2025. Behind this shift stands Vandi Verma, whose work hints at how future missions may explore worlds alone.

On November 13, NASA launched a new unmanned mission to Mars under the name ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers. The launch was met with fairly little fanfare in the press; unmanned Mars missions aren't exactly novel ...

NASA’s Perseverance rover has just made history by driving across Mars using routes planned by artificial intelligence instead of human operators. A vision-capable AI analyzed the same images and terrain data normally used by rover planners,

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California,

NASA has quietly crossed a new frontier in human–machine collaboration, handing a critical piece of Mars navigation to a commercial chatbot. Instead of painstakingly plotting every twist of the Perseverance rover’s path by hand,