NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as part of NASA's IM-3 launch, planned for late 2026. These rovers will spend roughly two weeks mapping the terrain as a self-guided team. No joystick will control them, and no human will approve each turn. The rovers will elect a leader among themselves, assign their own tasks and redraw their plans as a group when one of them runs low on charge.

China's new moon mission could unlock secret of lunar ice: Why that matters China is set to launch its Chang'e-7 unmanned, robotic space mission, possibly as early as Monday morning, to look for ice water in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon's south pole. This marks China's seventh and most ambitious moon mission so far. Here is what we know about it. What do we know about Chang'e-7? The Chang'e 7 launch window runs from Monday, August 24 to Monday, August 31, according to launch observers.

Nasa has released details of robotic landers, hopping drones and vehicles it aims to send to the Moon as part of US plans to build a lunar base. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin is one of several companies picked to build the machines. The US wants to land Americans back on the Moon before President Donald Trump leaves office in 2028. But Nasa is competing with China to return humans to the lunar surface, meaning the space agency is under pressure to appear to be winning the new space race. China is forging ahead with its own plans to land humans on the Moon by 2030.

We use machine learning to search for examples of Z/2 eigenfunctions on the 2-sphere. For this we created a multivalued version of a feedforward deep neural network, and we implemented it using the JAX library. We found Z/2 eigenfunctions for three cases: In the first two cases we fixed the branch points at the vertices of a tetrahedron and at a cube respectively. In a third case, we allowed the AI to move the branch points around and, in the end, it positioned the branch points at the vertices of a squashed tetrahedron.

On February 22nd, a robotic lander named Odysseus touched down on the sun-washed highlands near the south pole of the moon. It was the first time since the Apollo 17 mission, fifty-two years ago, that an American spacecraft had gracefully landed on the lunar surface. And yet NASA hadn't designed or built Odysseus; it was renting space onboard. Intuitive Machines, a relatively small aerospace firm based in Houston, was responsible for the lander, which launched atop a SpaceX rocket. The event was historic not just because it signalled a return to the moon but because it was the first time that a private company from any country had landed a spacecraft there.

Extreme cold is merciless on machinery. Rubber seals stiffen and crack. The problems pile up as the temperature falls. Metal becomes brittle, and wires contract. Batteries stop working, adhesives stop sticking and LCD screens go black as their liquid crystal freezes solid.

About a year ago I tried to bond with my 17-year-old over Sea of Thieves. Since then, he has harangued me about trying Outer Wilds, which he claims is the most profound gameplaying experience of his life. I have delayed to Hamletesque degrees: what will I do if another of his favourite games doesn't connect with me? Would that mean I can no longer connect with my son? As I discovered last month, it can sometimes be a struggle playing games in your 50s, and dropping down the difficulty can reduce the stress and help me enjoy myself more.

NASA's Artemis program aims to send astronauts to the south pole of the Moon, where water in the form of ice has been confirmed, rather than near the equator as with the Apollo mission. The dark areas are likely to contain more ice than the others but also to be dangerous for the astronauts venturing there. A team of researchers studied these areas using deep learning, the study entitled "Cryogeomorphic Characterization of Shadowed Regions in the Artemis Exploration Zone" was published in Geophysical Research Letters. For the first Artemis lunar missions, the selected astronauts (one man and one woman) will fly to the south pole of the moon. This region has a great potential, it is thought to have the greatest abundance of water ice because it has craters where the sun's rays never penetrate, their temperature is estimated at -170 .

NASA's next generation lunar backpack could give astronauts the ability to create a 3D map of the surface of the moon, as they walk across the regolith. The Kinematic Navigation and Cartography Knapsack (KNaCK) is a mobile lidar scanner, worn as a backpack that uses light and lasers to measure range. NASA researchers and industry partners developed the device that can not only aid astronauts in the airless wastelands of the Lunar South Pole, but also on the Earth. One suggested use is for a mountaineering expedition in an unchartered environment. The hikers can create a real-time map for others in the party, as well as other hikers that might come after them - all from a simple backpack.

NASA has selected a landing site for its golf cart-sized VIPER rover, which is set to land on the Moon in 2023 in search of traces of water. The robotic vehicle will land near the western edge of the Nobile Crater, a 45-mile-wide impact crater at the Moon's south pole, the space agency announced. NASA said the terrain in the Nobile region is'most suitable for the VIPER rover to navigate, communicate, and characterise potential water and other resources'. Nobile Crater was formed through a collision with another smaller celestial body, and is almost permanently covered in shadows, allowing ice to exist there. The Moon's south pole is one of the coldest areas in our Solar System and no prior missions to the Moon's surface have explored it.