UC Davis

“Automating Discovery and the Engineering of Off-Earth Futures” examines NASA’s efforts to engineer what is described as “autonomous scientific discovery” in the Mars Exploration Program and its fleet of Mars Rovers through artificial intelligence and machine learning. At the intersections of Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, “Automating Discovery” asks: What are the material conditions and histories of the Mars Exploration Program rovers as increasingly autonomous scientific laboratories? And, building on the field of laboratory studies, what is the rover as laboratory when read through the fields of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies? In what ways is this rover a historical material product of the long histories of US settler colonialism, imperialism, and global racial capitalism? To address these questions, each chapter of “Automating Discovery” examines a different aspect of the material conditions that shape the fantasy of autonomous scientific discovery and the rovers of the Mars Exploration Program as autonomous scientific laboratories. What political stakes of life in our current inter-planetary moment does such an intervention articulate and make clear? How can such an intervention guide anti-colonial research practice? To answer these questions, “Automating Discovery” historicizes and contextualizes NASA’s efforts to engineer autonomous scientific discovery through US imperial and colonial relations in the transpacific. In so doing, “Automating Discovery” seeks to position the Mars rover as an “autonomous colonial laboratory,” and articulate critical strategies through which the expansion of such a laboratory might be resisted.