40 articles found
NASA's Curiosity rover navigates alien terrain with minimal human intervention, making complex decisions millions of miles from mission control. Meanwhile, industrial robots still need constant supervision to pick boxes off conveyor belts. The gap between space robotics and earthbound automation reveals an uncomfortable truth about where we've chosen to invest our ingenuity.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover continues its exploration of Gale Crater, with scientists at JPL's Rover Operations Center managing daily operations and analyzing data about Mars' ancient habitability. The rover has discovered evidence of ancient lakes, organic molecules, and environmental conditions that could have supported microbial life billions of years ago, requiring careful coordination between rover operations and science teams to maximize mission objectives.
NASA's upcoming CADRE mission will test autonomous rovers that coordinate without human oversight, choosing their own leaders and dividing tasks among themselves. It's a glimpse of a future where machines don't just follow orders—they negotiate, delegate, and make collective decisions in real time.
NASA's upcoming CADRE mission represents a quiet shift in how we think about space robotics. Instead of remote-controlled machines following commands from Earth, three small rovers will coordinate with each other, elect leaders, and adapt plans autonomously — all while humans watch from 240,000 miles away.
NASA's CADRE mission will test autonomous rovers on the Moon that can coordinate with each other and make independent decisions without real-time human control. The three rovers will elect leaders, assign tasks, and adapt plans as a team during a two-week lunar exploration mission, demonstrating technology necessary for future long-term lunar operations including potential resource extraction at the South Pole.
HEBI Robotics has secured a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant to develop miniaturized, high-torque-density modular actuators for small satellites and harsh environments through December 2026. The Pittsburgh-based company aims to bridge the gap between low-cost hobby servos and expensive custom space robotics systems, with applications extending beyond aerospace to terrestrial field operations in challenging conditions.
Magmotor Technologies, a 150-year-old motor manufacturer, specializes in custom brush motors for industrial robotics and aerospace applications, including NASA rovers and BattleBots robots. The company is planning a major expansion and expects growing demand for its motors in the robotics industry, particularly for legacy systems and specialized applications requiring high reliability.
NASA has launched the Swift Boost mission to rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which is falling faster than expected due to increased solar activity. LINK, a robotic spacecraft designed by Katalyst Space, will dock with Swift using three robotic arms and tug the telescope to a higher orbit, extending its operational life by approximately a decade.
Icarus Robotics has selected KULR Technology Group to supply batteries for JOY, its autonomous free-flying space robot scheduled to launch to the International Space Station in early 2027. JOY will use KULR's K1S battery systems engineered to NASA safety standards, with flight heritage from the Artemis II mission, to power its embodied AI systems for autonomous navigation and maintenance tasks aboard the ISS.
NASA's Perseverance rover has traveled 26.2 miles (a marathon distance) on Mars in five years, becoming only the second rover to achieve this milestone after Opportunity. The rover reached this distance while exploring terrain west of Jezero Crater, where it has discovered evidence of an ancient lake and potential signs of ancient microbial life.
NASA is testing the Ernest (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain) prototype rover, which features active suspension and can individually lift its wheels to climb obstacles, achieving speeds of 0.6 mph compared to Perseverance's 0.1 mph. The prototype, tested in the Colorado Desert, demonstrates new mobility approaches using powered joints and multiple gaits that could enable future Mars and lunar missions to cover more ground with greater autonomy from Earth-based controllers.
NASA's AstroPix gamma-ray detector technology will be demonstrated in orbit aboard the Fly Foundational Robots mission launching in late 2027, where a robotic arm from Motiv Space Systems will pick up and reposition the sensors. The AstroPix chips, developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, use silicon pixel detectors similar to smartphone camera sensors but optimized to measure gamma rays in the 20,000 to 700,000 electron volt range, filling a sensitivity gap for observing gamma-ray bursts and active galaxies powered by black holes.
NASA mission to save a falling space telescope is ready to launch.
Voyager Technologies has agreed to acquire Astrobotic Technology, a Pittsburgh-based company specializing in commercial lunar delivery, lunar power systems, and reusable rocketry. The acquisition positions Voyager as a comprehensive lunar platform supporting NASA's Artemis program, with Astrobotic's landers, rovers, and infrastructure becoming core to Voyager's strategic lunar initiative, while the company also explores robotic applications for space-based infrastructure development.
NASA is developing a radiation-hardened AI space chip that delivers up to 100 times more computing power than current spacecraft processors while surviving deep space conditions. The High Performance Spaceflight Computing processor, currently undergoing rigorous testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, could enable spacecraft to operate more autonomously and support faster scientific analysis for future missions to the Moon and Mars.
This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial A startup ca...
The space agency is planning to put astronauts on the moon in 2028.
Astronomers at the University of Warwick have developed an AI system called RAVEN that discovered over 100 exoplanets in NASA's TESS mission data, including 31 newly confirmed worlds and 2,000+ high-quality candidates. The machine learning pipeline excels at distinguishing genuine planetary signals from false positives like eclipsing binary stars, enabling the identification of rare planet types including ultra-short-period worlds and those in the 'Neptunian desert.'
NASA's next eye into the cosmos is due to leave our planet later this year. The agency says it's targeting an early September launch for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman (for short) has a...
The search for signs of life on Mars continues to yield promising data. A first-of-its-kind wet chemistry experiment, published Tuesday in Nature, confirmed the presence of essential ingredients of li...
NASA's Perseverance rover completed its first Mars drives planned entirely by artificial intelligence, using vision-language models to autonomously identify safe routes across the Martian terrain. The system analyzed orbital images and terrain data to determine waypoints, reducing dependence on human planners and demonstrating how AI can enable more efficient autonomous exploration of distant worlds with significant communication delays.
NASA has confirmed the pending launch of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover, which is being sent to Mars. The current plan is to launch via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Ken...
NASA's Artemis II mission is about to make history. After a successful April 1 launch, and a trip of 39,000 miles through space, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hanse...
Rishi Jangale and Derek Pravecek with RoboBall III. Image credit: Emily Oswald/Texas A&M Engineering. By Alyssa Schaechinger While working at NASA in 2003, Dr. Robert Ambrose, director of the Robotics...
The Artemis II mission successfully launched into space on April 1, at 6:35pm Eastern time, from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will take NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, V...
Artemis II, the first crewed mission under the Artemis program, is scheduled to launch today, April 1. NASA is opening a two-hour window for its lift off, starting at 6:24 PM Eastern time, at the Kenn...
Scientists absorb data on monitors in mission control for NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. NASA/Bill Ingalls, CC BY-NC-ND. By Ari Koeppel, Dartmouth College NASA's search for evidence of past life on M...
The first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis moon program may take off in a matter of days, with a launch window that opens on April 1, and as preparations are underway for that, the space agency is ref...
NASA and ESA have released new images from the Hubble Space Telescope of a comet breaking up as it exits the solar system, captured as part of study recently published in the journal Icarus. The image...
Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison uncovered a critical flaw in how lunar and Martian rovers are tested on Earth. Simulations revealed that test results have been misleading for decades...
NASA will soon give it another go on April Fools' Day. On Thursday, NASA said it's targeting April 1 at 6:24 PM ET for the Artemis II mission's next launch attempt. In case that date doesn't pan out,...
It looks like a March launch is no longer in the cards for Artemis II, NASA's first crewed trip to the moon's vicinity since the final Apollo mission over 50 years ago. While preparations were underwa...
Carnegie Mellon University faculty and students recently experienced something few ever have: weightlessness. Aboard a plane that follows an unusual flight path - steep climbs followed by dramatic div...
The Artemis 2 launch is edging closer as NASA has now set a target date for the 10-day mission to get underway. The agency is aiming to launch as soon as March 6 following a successful wet dress rehea...
NASA started making the final preparations for the Artemis 2 mission in early January, with the hopes of opening its launch window as soon as February 6. After issues showed up during the mission's we...
Carnegie Mellon University researchers teamed up with scientists at NASA to develop a robot capable of searching underwater oceans on distant planets for signs of life. NASA's Exobiology Extant Life S...
NASA successfully used Anthropic's Claude AI model to plot a route for the Perseverance rover on Mars in December, marking the first time an LLM has been used to autonomously pilot the spacecraft. Claude analyzed years of rover data and waypoint imagery to map a 400-meter path through Jezero Crater, with NASA engineers estimating the AI approach will cut route-planning time in half and enable more frequent rover drives and scientific data collection.
After a tumultuous 2025 that saw it lose around 4,000 employees, NASA finally has an operating budget for 2026, and one that largely preserves its scientific capabilities. On Thursday, the Senate pass...
From physical constraints to acoustic challenges, learn how Amazon collaborated with NASA and Lockheed Martin to get Alexa to work in space.
Rungta had a promising career with NASA, but decided the stars aligned for her at Amazon.
