#martian-geology

#martian-geology

Only 24 people have seen the far side of the Moon with their own eyes in the entire history of humanity. All of them were men, Americans, and white: the crew members of the nine Apollo missions that traveled to the Moon between 1968 and 1972.

In the silent vacuum of space, five autonomous robots churn through the lunar surface, digging up a loose layer of rock and dust and leaving rows of uniform tracks in their wake. Stopping only to recharge at a central solar power station, the car-sized machines process the lunar dirt internally to extract a type of helium so rare on Earth that a palm-sized container is estimated to be worth millions.

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 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.

A global research team has analyzed the prospects for biomineralization on Mars, a process in which bacteria, fungi, and microalgae can create minerals as part of their metabolism, offering a byproduct that could be useful to prospective Martian explorers by providing the raw materials needed to produce aggregates such as concrete. With an extremely thin and mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, air pressure less than 1 percent of Earth's,

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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I think the first thing to remember is: We are right at the beginning of this adventure. There's so much excitement that every little signal - every "wiggle" in a spectrum - gets people saying, "Oh! That might be life!" And then, on the other side, other people respond with, "I don't see enough wiggles, so there's probably not even an atmosphere. Dead planet. Move on." Both reactions are too fast.