NASA reported yesterday that it has received 58 proposals for science and exploration technology instruments to fly aboard its next Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020. That is twice the number submitted for other recent instrument competitions, the agency said. NASA opened the competition for Mars 2020 research proposals in September and
NASA’s Curiosity rover has to be very, very careful when driving around Mars because if it gets stuck in a ditch, no friendly drivers will be passing by to tow it out. That’s essentially what happened to Curiosity’s predecessor Spirit, which NASA was forced to give up on in 2011. So it’s interesting to hear
Last week, DARPA and Boston Dynamics unveiled Atlas, the humanoid robot that seven lucky teams won the right to program for the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in December. They will be competing against a group of teams that created their own search-and-rescue robots, which remain shrouded in considerably more mystery. As we near the competition,
