Despite the growing adoption of radar in robotics, the majority of research has been confined to homogeneous sensor types, overlooking the integration and cross-modality challenges inherent in heterogeneous radar technologies. This leads to significant difficulties in generalizing across diverse radar data types, with modality-aware approaches that could leverage the complementary strengths of heterogeneous radar remaining unexplored. To bridge these gaps, we propose SHeRLoc, the first deep network tailored for heterogeneous radar, which utilizes RCS polar matching to align multimodal radar data. Our hierarchical optimal transport-based feature aggregation method generates rotationally robust multi-scale descriptors. By employing FFT-similarity-based data mining and adaptive margin-based triplet loss, SHeRLoc enables FOV-aware metric learning. SHeRLoc achieves an order of magnitude improvement in heterogeneous radar place recognition, increasing recall@1 from below 0.1 to 0.9 on a public dataset and outperforming state of-the-art methods. Also applicable to LiDAR, SHeRLoc paves the way for cross-modal place recognition and heterogeneous sensor SLAM. The supplementary materials and source code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/radar-sherloc.

Deep down, our drive to explore Mars has always been about figuring out the story of life in our solar system. Or is life on Earth descended from Martian progenitors? NASA is now on the verge of launching its most ambitious effort ever to chip away at those questions, in the form of a high-tech rover called Perseverance and a scheme to return some of the samples it finds back home. If all goes well, Perseverance will lift off on July 30, and by February it will join a small fleet of Martian landers and rovers whose close-up study of Mars's surface has, in many ways, led to this moment. Each of the other three rovers NASA has launched in the 21st century have been concerned with investigating the potential for the Red Planet to harbor ancient or current biology.

A small chunk of Mars will be heading home when the US space agency launches its latest rover mission on Thursday. Nasa's Perseverance robot will carry with it a meteorite that originated on the Red Planet and which, until now, has been lodged in the collection of London's Natural History Museum (NHM). The rock's known properties will act as a calibration target to benchmark the workings of a rover instrument. It will give added confidence to any discoveries the robot might make. This will be particularly important if Perseverance stumbles across something that hints at the presence of past life on the planet - one of the mission's great quests.

NASA has shared new details about the sensors used on the Perseverance rover as it travels the surface of Mars in search for signs of past microbial life. The instruments, a high powered camera and an ultraviolet laser, will work in tandem to take readings of the soil to help determine its chemical and mineral makeup. The main instrument, called SHERLOC (or Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals), will be mounted on the end of one of the rover's robotic arms. NASA's Persevernce rover will travel across Mars using an ultraviolet laser to determine what minerals and compounds are present in the soil, based on the way the light scatters SHERLOC will emit a quarter-sized ultraviolet laser at the ground, and scientists will measure the way the light scatters when it hits the ground to infer what kind of minerals and chemical compounds it's made of. The technique will also be used to identify the unique spectral'fingerprint' that certain organic material might give off in the hopes of tracking down potential signs of past life.

File photo: The planet Mars showing showing Terra Meridiani is seen in an undated NASA image. A million-years-old rock is flying home. The ancient rock, named "Sayh al Uhaymir 008," or "SaU008," was once part of one of a meteorite that landed on Earth after blowing off from Mars millions of years ago. SaU008 was discovered in Oman in 1999 and is the only one of 200 similar rocks that's strong enough to withstand the journey back home, according to NASA. "Every year, we provide hundreds of meteorite specimens to scientists all over the world to for study," Caroline Smith, the principal curator of meteorites at London's Natural History Museum – which provided the rock, said in the press release. "This is a first for us: sending one of our samples back home for the benefit of science."