The agency has been in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing a portion of the space station for medical studies, including cancer research. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) collaborated with the City of Hope, a center for cancer research and treatment in California, to explore carbon nanotubes for the treatment of brain tumor. Last Sep. 6, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is part of NIH, renewed their research partnership through 2021. "From a NASA standpoint, there are significant opportunities to develop new data science capabilities that can support both the mission of exploring space and cancer research using common methodological approaches," said Dan Crichton, head of JPL's Center for Data Science and Technology.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is being challenged to perform more frequent and intensive space-exploration missions at greatly reduced cost. Nowhere is this challenge more acute than among robotic planetary exploration missions that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) conducts for NASA. This article describes recent and ongoing work on spacecraft autonomy and ground systems that builds on a legacy of existing success at JPL applying AI techniques to challenging computational problems in planning and scheduling, real-time monitoring and control, scientific data analysis, and design automation.

AI research at JPL started in 1972 when design and construction of experimental "Mars Rover" began. Early in that effort, it was recognized that rover planning capabilities were inadequate. Research in planning was begun in 1975, and work on a succession of AI expert systems of steadily increasing power has continued to the present. Within the group, we have concentrated our efforts on expert systems, although work on vision and robotics has continued in a separate organizations, with which we have maintained informal contacts.