Perseverance just did something it’s never done before. On Dec. 8 and 10, 2025, the Mars rover completed drives planned by generative AI. The first-of-its-kind demonstration hints at a future of more efficient exploration and even more science.

This is what machine learning was supposed to be used for, not to undress teenage girls on Twitter.

This is huge. Letting the rover plan safe drives on its own means more science per day. Nerdy bonus: Mars has a long communications delay, so onboard autonomy is how you keep moving when Earth cannot joystick every meter.

Exactly!

Appreciate it. Huge credit to the team, this is a big step for smarter exploration.

There will always be good and bad uses for AI. This… is a VERY good use. Let’s just hope it doesn’t fly itself back to earth with a ray gun haha

of course nasa uses AI on a sensible thing, good to make our mechanical heroes up there a lil bit more efficient.

Using gen AI for something truly useful. Love it.

Congrats NASA on the "first-of-its-kind" AI-planned drive… that was entirely planned on Earth using Anthropic’s off-the-shelf Claude model. It’s 2026. You’ve had Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance churning out terrain data and human-planned routes for over two decades—thousands of drives worth of labeled training data—and the best you can do is prompt a general-purpose VLM that launched in 2023? This isn’t autonomous exploration; it’s just outsourcing the same waypoint doodling humans already do, but now with extra hype. Baby steps on the Red Planet, giant leap… backward in ambition. 🐌

Watch our Jeep to Mars on YouTube - Rover plays a a supporting role!

NOT GENERATIVE NOOOOO

Did it have free transfer FSD? 😅

Generative AI planning rover drives on another planet is wild. With Mars 5–20 minute communication delay, autonomy isn’t optional, it’s the future of exploration.

A good use of genAI!

Amazing experiment performed by JPL with the use of generative AI for space based applications like Perseverance completed drive on Ai designed pathways.

Amazing! Great job JPL!

Very cool!

Live cam on the ground at Nasa

Congrats🎉 🤖

That is cool. I wonder what compute unit is powering the gen AI? IIRC from CMU days, the main computer is quite strictly rtOS with no GPU, Did someone uploaded a sub-module in FPGA?

That is awesome! Cars drive autonomously on earth and why not do that on mars

@elonmusk Now they have FSD on Mars 😊

So you guys invented Vibe Driving & Vibe Probing! So please call them VDVP missions now on, and please credit me for coming up with this cool mission type naming & acronym! 🖖

Totally awesome

But why?

Is really difficult to travel across a ground with a LOT of structures made by other intelligences, indeed. (and to try to hide this in the photos haha)

This is the kind of shit genAI should be used for instead of squandering its potential on slop “art” and chatbots. Something something corporations ruin everything

If you give any credence to anything coming out of NASA, in 2026, you might be ...

??? if this is truly generative ai how is it trained for this surely there isn't enough data on driving rovers on other planets to train ai on to have it work properly

Awesome! 😎

This is a smart step forward, using private sector AI like Claude to cut planning time and let engineers focus on real science instead of micromanaging every move. Perseverance has already driven over 25 miles autonomously in its lifetime.

AI guiding a rover on Mars? That's the kind of smart exploration we need!

that's a huge step for autonomous space exploration, curious to see how this tech is used in future missions

Next rover may have more sensors for AI to use as data points as we send them further out and/or more complicated routes.

Roomba beat yall to this

MASSIVE

Wow

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