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Mars Rovers to get Smarter

Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will soon get a software upgrade allowing them to make "intelligent decisions" on which pictures to send back to Earth for study of Martian clouds and dust devils (see photo).

JPL's Rebecca Castano explains, "The idea now is to collect as much data as the instrument can, analyze them onboard for features of specific interest, and then down-link only the data that have the highest priority."

NASA plans to build and launch increasingly autonomous robotic craft in the future, to allow human scientists to spend more time studying interesting data and less time sifting through mountains of data to find it.

Source: BBC