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is expected to determine whether Mars is or was ever habitable to microbial lif

whittled down to four. They are regions of Mars known as Mawrth Vallis, Gale crater, Holden crater and Eberswalde crater.

ESA's Planck mission has released its first full-sky map. The image shows the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in higher resolution than ever before and it may help cosmologists to develop a much clearer picture of the early universe. "This is the moment that Planck was conceived for," says David Southwood, who is ESA's director of science and robotic exploration. "We are opening the door to an Eldorado where scientists can seek the nuggets that will lead to deeper understanding of how our universe came to be and how it works now."

Neural networks -- collections of artificial neurons or nodes set up to behave like the neurons in the brain -- can be trained to carry out a variety of tasks, often having something to do with pattern or sequence recognition. As such, they have shown great promise in image recognition systems. Now, research coming out of the University of Hong Kong has shown that neural networks can hear as well as see. A neural network there has learned the features of sound, classifying songs into specific genres with 87 percent accuracy.

Similar networks based on auditory cortexes have been rewired for vision, so it would appear these kinds of neural networks are quite flexible in their functions. As such, it seems they could potentially be applied to all sorts of perceptual tasks in artificial intelligence systems, the possibilities of which have only begun to be explored.

They have clearly shown us the path forward to the inevitable large-scale exploration of the near-Earth asteroid population

Interest in asteroid missions has also been on the rise in the United States. In June, US President Barack Obama called for a manned trip to an asteroid. And late last year, the OSIRIS-REx project, also a sample-return mission targeting a carbon-rich asteroid, was selected as a finalist in NASA's New Frontiers Program,

Asteroids happen to be particularly rich in platinum group metals

a motive for space travel beyond "the pursuit of knowledge"

So to those despairing about the recent cutting of space budgets across the world, invest your savings in asteroid mining

the little android's oil bearings and ultrasonic sensors will not work in the lunar vacuum

The one-sixth gravity presents problems for stable movement, and Moon dust clogs joints.

the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa), the country's space agency. It runs the rockets needed to deliver their robot to the Moon and, so far, has been distinctly cool on the idea.

NASA's grand plan to return to the moon, built on President George W. Bush's vision of an ambitious new chapter in space exploration, is about to vanish with hardly a whimper

a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts into low Earth orbit

Obama budget as disastrous for human space fligh

For Wegener the aim of the work is not about focusing all efforts on creating invisibility cloaks, but is about exploring a range of applications in transformation optics. This involves calculating what kind of material is needed to bend light in a certain way, by considering light trajectories as the result of the warping of space. Wegener says that transformation optics should lead, for example, to the design of better antennas or smaller optical resonators.

Those initial surveyor bots will pave the way for the construction of the unmanned moon base near the lunar south pole, which the robots will construct for themselves.

Even if Japan falls short of its 2020 deadline, the advances in robotics technology that could fall out of this little project could be as exciting as the moon base itself.