Luna 9 was the first humanmade object to reach the moon in 1966. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For nearly 60 years, the first humanmade object to successfully land on the moon has been missing. However, researchers may now be closer than ever to finding the Soviet Union's Luna 9 spacecraft. Using an advanced machine learning program, an international team of scientists believe they have finally narrowed down a list of finalists for Luna 9's location.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has unearthed the potential to assist humans in controlling advanced technologies. Shared autonomy (SA) facilitates control by combining inputs from a human pilot and an AI copilot. In prior SA studies, the copilot is constantly active in determining the action played at each time step. This limits human autonomy that may have deleterious effects on performance. In general, the amount of helpful copilot assistance varies greatly depending on the task dynamics.

Private companies are testing new power systems for longer rover missions and future human lunar habitats. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A future lunar lander bound for the dark side of the moon will carry along a piece of equipment that could make these missions a little bit brighter. The lander in question is operated by Firefly Aerospace, the first commercial company to successfully land and operate spacecraft on the moon. A LightPort wireless power receiver will be mounted atop the Firefly Blue Ghost lander's upper deck.Developed by Canadian aerospace startup Volta Space Technologies, the cargo plays a key role in Volta's ultimate goal: establishing a network of satellites that can wirelessly beam solar power to spacecraft on the lunar surface.

Monte Carlo Tree Search is a cornerstone algorithm for online planning, and its root-parallel variant is widely used when wall clock time is limited but best performance is desired. In environments with continuous action spaces, how to best aggregate statistics from different threads is an important yet underexplored question. In this work, we introduce a method that uses Gaussian Process Regression to obtain value estimates for promising actions that were not trialed in the environment. We perform a systematic evaluation across 6 different domains, demonstrating that our approach outperforms existing aggregation strategies while requiring a modest increase in inference time.

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive success in control tasks. However, its policies, represented as opaque neural networks, are often difficult for humans to understand, verify, and debug, which undermines trust and hinders real-world deployment. This work addresses this challenge by introducing a novel approach for programmatic control policy discovery, called Multimodal Large Language Model-assisted Evolutionary Search (MLES). MLES utilizes multimodal large language models as programmatic policy generators, combining them with evolutionary search to automate policy generation. It integrates visual feedback-driven behavior analysis within the policy generation process to identify failure patterns and guide targeted improvements, thereby enhancing policy discovery efficiency and producing adaptable, human-aligned policies. Experimental results demonstrate that MLES achieves performance comparable to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) across two standard control tasks while providing transparent control logic and traceable design processes. This approach also overcomes the limitations of predefined domain-specific languages, facilitates knowledge transfer and reuse, and is scalable across various tasks, showing promise as a new paradigm for developing transparent and verifiable control policies.

NASA's Boss Just Shook Up the Agency's Plans to Land on the Moon Sean Duffy called out SpaceX for being "behind schedule" on a lunar lander and said he'd explore other options. NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency's plans to return humans to the moon. Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA's projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the moon from lunar orbit and back.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has unearthed the potential to assist humans in controlling advanced technologies.

Black-box AI systems are increasingly being deployed to help end-users with everyday tasks.