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.

As NASA attempts to return to the moon in 2024, the U.S. space agency has tasked Lockheed Martin and General Motors to create a new electric, autonomous lunar rover. The rover will use GM's autonomous driving technology and allow it to go'significantly farther' than the ones the auto maker worked on during the Apollo program, some 50 years ago. Though the rover is still in the planning stages, both companies highlighted that it is imperative it allows astronauts to traverse difficult terrains of the lunar south pole, which could hold a number of interesting discoveries, including water. A concept of what the Lockheed Martin-GM rover might look like on the moon's south pole The lunar south pole is a site of interest for scientists and agencies planning crewed missions to the Moon. This is because water ice has been found in shadowed areas in that region with craters that never get sunlight.

SpaceX successfully launches NASA astronauts from Kennedy Space Center into space. NASA's ambitious lunar program Artemis will send the agency's first mobile robot to the moon in late 2023. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, also known as VIPER, would search the planet for ice and other resources on and below its surface that could potentially be harvested for long-term exploration in the future. WHO GETS TO BE AN ASTRONAUT DURING THE PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT BOOM? Using the first-ever headlights on a lunar rover, VIPER will explore the lunar South Pole and "permanently" dark regions of the moon – some of the coldest areas in the solar system.