NASA is developing an Alexa-enabled robot for its Mars mission 2020 The announcement was made during Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton session at the ongoing AWS re:Invent 2016 conference in Las Vegas. The first day of the tenth Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent event closed today with a Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton (VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS) session at Hall B, Sands Expo, Las Vegas. During the session, Hamilton invited several guest speakers to share the stage with him, including Tom Soderstorm, IT Chief Technology Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Soderstorm spoke of the role cloud computing plays in NASA’s mission to return to Mars in 2020. “We now have technologies, new partnerships coming in, and it’s going to be an exciting time,” he opened. He continued by stating that NASA is going to continue its Mars mission in 2020, by landing a new spacecraft on its surface just like they have done four years ago. The new explorer will have improved features such as new wheels with better ability to climb taller hills, a microphone for scientists to record sounds from the planet, drills to dig and store rock samples, and an ability to produce oxygen “to prepare for the next Matt Damons that might come up and need some help.”
