NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring the Red Planet's surface for nearly a decade, with its main mission being to determine whether Mars was once habitable. While the rover's investigations have indeed confirmed that Mars was once a watery world filled with potentially life-sustaining chemistry, there's still much to learn. Curiosity's mountains of data offer an opportunity to use machine learning algorithms to investigate the planet's surface in even more detail. Rammelkamp et al. focused on the data collected by Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument package. ChemCam combines two instruments: a laser-induced breakdown spectrometer (LIBS) and a remote micro-imager (RMI) for high-resolution imaging.

The Curiosity Mars Rover is now smart enough to pick its own targets for exploration, according to a new study. The secret to Curiosity's better brain was a software update sent from the ground in October 2015, called the Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS). This was the first time artificial intelligence had been tried on a remote probe, and the results have shown that similar AI techniques could be applied to future missions, according to the NASA scientists working on the project. AEGIS allows the rover to be "trained" to identify rocks with certain characteristics that scientists on the ground want to investigate. This is valuable because Curiosity's human controllers can't be in direct contact with the rover all the time.

The software, known as Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS, selected inspection-worthy rocks and soil targets with 93 percent accuracy between last May and this April, according to a study from its developers published this week in the journal Science Robotics. AEGIS works with an instrument on Curiosity called the ChemCam, short for chemistry and camera. The ChemCam, a one-eyed, brick-shaped device that sits atop the rover's spindly robotic neck, emits laser beams at rocks and soil as far as 23 feet away. It then uses the light coming from the impacts to analyze and detect the geochemical composition of the vaporized material. Before AEGIS, when Curiosity arrived at a new spot, ready to explore, it fired the laser at whatever rock or soil fell into the field of view of its navigation cameras.

Nasa is giving its Curiosity rover more autonomy on its lonely mission across the desolate surface of Mars. Curiosity is normally piloted remotely by humans, but signals can take as long as 24 minutes to get from Earth to Mars. Nasa has decided to allow Curiosity's autonomous systems, which are used to pick out rocks to fire lasers at, more control to streamline missions. Since May 2016, AEGIS accurately selected desired targets over 2.5 km (1.5 miles) of unexplored Martian terrain 94 per cent of the time (left chart), compared to the 24 per cent (right chart) expected without the software. Curiosity's AEGIS software, or Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, is used to direct and fire Curiosity's ChemCam instrument.