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,

Artemis II, the next mission in NASA’s Artemis program to explore the Moon, is scheduled to launch from Florida within the coming weeks. The mission will be the first crewed mission to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972, with the four-person crew expected to travel farther than any other human mission in spaceflight history.

NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Nicola Fox explains an intriguing rock that the Perseverance rover inspected named "Cheyava Falls." Credit: NASA

"The images MAVEN captured truly are incredible," Shannon Curry, MAVEN's principal investigator and research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, said as quoted by NASA.

NASA reports that its moon mission is accelerating, with plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028.