NASA teaching Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot to explore caves on Mars as it looks for life

Though NASA's Perseverance rover is on the Mars surface looking for signs of ancient life, the US space agency believes that robots looking in caves may help the US space agency find life outside this planet. As such, it is working with a number of contractors, including Boston Dynamics, on a project known as BRAILLE (Biologic and Resource Analog Investigations in Low Light Environments), exploring Mars-like caves on Earth in hopes that one day they will be used for future missions. Fully autonomous robots, like Boston Dynamics' Spot, could help explore these caves, which are believed to be hundreds of feet long and make communicating with Earth difficult, if not impossible. NASA is training robots like Boston Dynamics' Spot (pictured) to help traverse caves on Earth for future missions to Mars It is part of NASA's BRAILLE (Biologic and Resource Analog Investigations in Low Light Environments) project Fully autonomous robots could help explore Martian caves, believed to be hundreds of feet long. On Earth, NASA has incorporated its autonomy and artificial intelligence system, NeBula, into Spot, to help it explore the moon, Mars and other places in the solar system. 'Future potential human exploration missions can benefit from robots in many different ways,' Ali Agha, the project's research lead, told CBS News. 'Particularly, robots can be sent in precursor missions to provide more information about the destination before humans land on those destinations.