A NASA rover on Mars has finished the first journey on another planet that was completely planned by Artificial Intelligence. The Perseverance Mars rover made this trip on December 8 and 10 in 2025 with its route points chosen by generative AI. NASA explains that this is a complicated decision-making job that human mission scientists on Earth usually handle. However this time the team used vision-capable AI to design a path across the Martian surface without any human involvement.
How Artificial Intelligence Successfully Navigated the Martian Terrain
To carry out this demonstration the Perseverance rover team used a type of generative AI called vision-language models that had access to existing data from the mission’s dataset. The AI used the same imagery and data that humans use to generate fixed locations on Mars where the rover picks up new instructions. These are known as waypoints. Generative AI also used imagery from the HiRISE camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which orbits Mars. And it used data from digital elevation models to study the Martian terrain and identify potentially hazardous features like boulders and sand ripples & outcrops. Using all this data the AI was able to produce a continuous path for Perseverance on the surface of the Red Planet including waypoints. On 8 December 2025 Perseverance drove 210 meters or 689 feet. Then on 10 December it drove 246 meters or 807 feet.
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Researchers React to AI’s First Autonomous Drive on Mars
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says this demonstration shows how much our capabilities have improved & expands the ways we will explore other worlds. Autonomous technologies like this help missions work more efficiently & respond to difficult terrain while increasing scientific discoveries as we travel farther from Earth. It shows how teams can apply new technology carefully and responsibly in actual operations. Vandi Verma is a space roboticist at JPL and works on the Perseverance engineering team. She explains that the basic elements of generative AI show great promise in improving autonomous navigation for driving on other planets. This includes perception which means seeing rocks and ripples, localization which means knowing where the rover is & planning and control which means deciding & following the safest path. We are moving toward a future where generative AI and other smart tools will help our surface rovers drive for kilometers while reducing the work for operators. These tools will also identify interesting surface features for our science team by searching through large amounts of rover images. Matt Wallace manages JPL’s Exploration Systems Office. He imagines intelligent systems not only on Earth but also in our rovers, helicopters, drones and other surface equipment. These systems would be trained with the combined knowledge of our NASA engineers, scientists and astronauts. That is the game-changing technology we need to build the infrastructure & systems required for a permanent human presence on the Moon and take the United States to Mars and beyond.
