Before the year 2020, scientists are expected to launch intelligent space robots that will venture out to explore the universe for us.

Researchers are working on creating autonomous spacecrafts that will be able to analyze data about points of interest as it passes and then make quick decisions about what needs to be investigated, according to Wolfgang Fink, a physicist and senior researcher at the California Institute of Technology.

“Robotic exploration probably will always be the trail blazer for human exploration of far space,” said Fink. “We haven’t yet landed a human being on Mars but we have a robot there now. In that sense, it’s much easier to send a robotic explorer. When you can take the human out of the loop, that is becoming very exciting.”

NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are using a robotic arm onboard the Mars Lander that’s been working on the Martian north pole for more than a month and a half now. Programmers send up daily instruction code to the arm, telling it to dig trenches in the soil or scoop up ice scrapings and deposit them in one of the analysis tools onboard.