NASA Achieves Milestone: Perseverance Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover has achieved a historic milestone on Mars by completing the first rover drives on another planet planned with the help of generative artificial intelligence. The breakthrough involved Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, marking the first time an AI model directly assisted in planning a rover’s movement beyond Earth.

According to NASA and Anthropic, Claude played a role in executing commands on December 8 and 10, with a key AI-assisted drive taking place on January 27. Instead of relying entirely on traditional, manually intensive planning methods, mission teams provided Claude with a terrain map and specific scientific objectives to guide the rover’s route across the Martian surface.

Using advanced vision-language models, Claude analysed mission datasets and generated a series of waypoints—intermediate navigation targets that help the rover move safely and efficiently. These waypoints took into account slope limits, terrain hazards, and operational safety constraints, tasks that are typically handled by engineers through lengthy calculations and reviews.

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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed the achievement in a newsroom post, noting that while Claude generated the initial navigation plan, human mission engineers remained firmly in the loop. The AI-generated waypoints were carefully reviewed, refined, and validated before being transmitted to Perseverance, ensuring that safety and mission integrity were not compromised.

Once approved, the instructions were uplinked across a distance of roughly 362 million kilometres between Earth and Mars. The rover then successfully executed the planned movements, demonstrating that AI-assisted planning can function reliably in one of the most challenging environments known to science.

The milestone highlights the growing role of artificial intelligence in space exploration. While human oversight remains essential, NASA officials say AI tools like Claude could help speed up planning, reduce workloads, and enable more autonomous operations in future missions to Mars and beyond.

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