#mars-canals

#mars-canals

Galileo Galilei described the moon using earthly comparisons, invoking images of sunlight on craters, which shaped early perceptions of the lunar landscape.

It did so with the blessing of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who decided to delegate the meticulous work of route planning to Anthropic's AI model. This involves consulting orbital and surface imagery of Mars in order to set a series of waypoints to guide the rover's movements. Once plotted, this data gets transmitted about 140 million miles or 225 million kilometers - the average distance from Earth to Mars - where it's received by Perseverance as a navigational plan.

Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars. Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet, it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot.

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NASA has revealed it repurposed the processor the Perseverance rover used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, to help the rolling robot navigate the Red Planet autonomously "for potentially unlimited distances." The aerospace agency revealed the hack last week in a post that says it used the rover's Helicopter Base Station (HBS) because its processor is 100 times faster than the rover's other kit.

It's a plant! It's a fungus! It's... an entirely new type of lifeform hitherto unknown to science? That appears to be the case for a puzzling, spire-shaped organism that lived over 400 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. After analyzing its internal structures, the authors argue that the mystifying ancient beings known as prototaxites don't belong to any of the existing biological kingdoms.

NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6. Attempts to make contact with the Mars orbiter are ongoing. The final fragments of data indicated that the spacecraft was tumbling and had possibly changed trajectory. The MAVEN team is analyzing snippets of data recovered from a December 6 radio science campaign to develop a timeline of possible events.

In all the known Universe, at least as of 2026, the only world known to support life is planet Earth. Despite all we've learned about the Universe, including: the vast abundance of exoplanets, including rocky exoplanets with Earth-like temperatures, the ubiquity of heavy elements, the commonness of organic molecules that are known precursors to life, and the long cosmic timescales over which stars with such planets form, there are no known examples of worlds, other than our own, where life processes or definitive biosignatures have been detected.