NASA used Claude to plot a route for its Perseverance rover on Mars

"Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars. Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet, it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot."

""Every rover drive needs to be carefully planned, lest the machine slide, tip, spin its wheels, or get beached," NASA said. "So ever since the rover landed, its human operators have painstakingly laid out waypoints - they call it a 'breadcrumb trail' - for it to follow, using a combination of images taken from space and the rover's onboard cameras.""

""To get Claude to complete the task, NASA had to first provide Claude Code, Anthropic's programming agent, with the "years" of contextual data from the rover before the model could begin writing a route for Perseverance. Claude then went about the mapping process methodically, stringing together waypoints from ten-meter segments it would later critique and iterate on. This being NASA we're talking about, engineers from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made sure to double check the model's work before sending it to Perseverance.""

Perseverance drove approximately 400 meters through a rocky field in Jezero crater along a route planned by Anthropic's Claude between December 8 and 10. NASA provided Claude Code with years of contextual rover data so the model could generate a route. Claude built the path by chaining and iterating ten-meter waypoints. JPL engineers ran standard mission simulations to validate and review the waypoints, then implemented only minor changes before sending commands. Rover navigation requires careful waypoint planning to avoid sliding, tipping, wheel spin, or becoming beached, using orbital and onboard imagery for guidance.

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