Add source Login
NASA used Claude to plot a route for its Perseverance rover on Mars

NASA used Claude to plot a route for its Perseverance rover on Mars

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. Between December 8 and 10, Perseverance drove approximately 400 meters (about 437 yards) through a field of rocks on the Martian surface mapped out by Claude. As you might imagine, using an AI model to plot a course for Perseverance wasn't as simple as inputting a single prompt. As NASA explains, routing Perseverance is no easy task, even for a human. "Every rover drive needs to be carefully planned, lest the machine slide, tip, spin its wheels, or get beached," NASA said. "So ever since the rover landed, its human operators have painstakingly laid out waypoints — they call it a 'breadcrumb trail' — for it to follow, using a combination of images taken from space and the rover’s onboard cameras." To get Claude to complete the task, NASA had to first provide Claude Code , Anthropic's programming agent, with the "years" of contextual data from the rover before the model could begin writing a route for Perseverance. Claude then went about the mapping process methodically, stringing together waypoints from ten-meter segments it would later critique and iterate on. This being NASA we're talking about, engineers from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made sure to double check the model's work before sending it to Perseverance. The JPL team ran Claude's waypoints through a simulation they use every day to confirm the accuracy of commands sent to the rover. In the end, NASA says it only had to make "minor changes" to Claude's route, with one tweak coming as a result of the fact the team had access to ground-level images Claude hadn't seen in its planning process. "The engineers estimate that using Claude in this way will cut the route-planning time in half, and make the journeys more consistent," NASA said. "Less time spent doing tedious manual planning — and less time spent training — allows the rover’s operators to fit in even more drives, collect even more scientific data, and do even more analysis. It means, in short, that we’ll learn much more about Mars." While the productivity gains offered by AI are often overstated , in the case of NASA, any tool that could allow its scientists to be more efficient is sure to be welcome. Over the summer, the agency lost about 4,000 employees – accounting for about 20 percent of its workforce – due to Trump administration cuts. Going into 2026, the president had proposed gutting the agency's science budget by nearly half before Congress ultimately rejected that plan in early January . Still, even with its funding preserved just below 2025 levels, the agency has a tough road ahead. It's being asked to return to the Moon with less than half the workforce it had during the height of the Apollo program. For Anthropic, meanwhile, this is a major feat. You may recall last spring Claude couldn't even beat Pokémon Red . In less than a year, the company's models have gone from struggling to navigate a simple 8-bit Game Boy game to successfully plotting a course for a rover on a distant planet. NASA is excited about the possibility of future collaborations, saying "autonomous AI systems could help probes explore ever more distant parts of the solar system." This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/nasa-used-claude-to-plot-a-route-for-its-perseverance-rover-on-mars-203150701.html?src=rss

Very first Apple check & early Apple-1 motherboard sold for $5 million combined

Very first Apple check & early Apple-1 motherboard sold for $5 million combined

An auction that featured Steve Jobs' signed checks, his collection of Bob Dylan 8-track cassettes, computers, bow ties, and more has concluded, pulling down more than $8 million. Image credit: RR Auction The check, regarded as "the earliest known check drawn from Apple's original bank account," raked in $2,409,886, as part of the recent "Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution: The Apple 50th Anniversary Auction." The auction realized a total of $8,153,074. "This is the most important financial document in Apple history," said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction. "It captures Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's first true business transaction, and the final result shows that collectors recognized its significance above any other Apple material ever brought to market. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

9to5Mac Daily: January 30, 2026 – AAPL earnings, $2B acquisition

9to5Mac Daily: January 30, 2026 – AAPL earnings, $2B acquisition

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac . 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app , Stitcher , TuneIn , Google Play , or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players. Sponsored by Stuff: Stuff helps you get everything out of your head and into a simple, elegant system—closing open loops and reducing mental stress. Use code 9TO5 at checkout for 50% off your first year. more…