The Brief

In a windy patch of desert outside Barstow, Calif., a 700-pound planetary rover named Helelani is churning its thick tires through a flour-like dust. Seven teams from around the world are taking turns steering this dune-buggy-like rover through the course. And as the rover weaves through a slalom course of cones, NASA technologist Rob Mueller explains that this silty dry lakebed is a pretty good analog for adventures on another planet.

"It's an extreme environment. That's why we're here," Mueller says. "It's blowing dust. It gets hot in the day, cold at night. We even have dust devils, small tornadoes coming through once in a while. So it's very Mars-like."

Mueller is outfitted in a heavy tan work jacket and a NASA baseball cap, and though it's bitterly cold and windy for us humans, he says the robots don't mind. Even if they did, pushing them to their limits is the whole point.

"The unexpected happens out here – dust jamming into a mechanism is not going to happen in a lab," he says. "We want to break the robots many times. Fix them, run them again. By the time they get to the moon and Mars, they'll work."

RoboPalooza has some of the trappings of other desert festivals, like food trucks, portable toilets, and live rock bands like Better than Bad (seen here).

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Festival attendees watch a robotic dog in action.

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This rover race is part of a new festival Mueller dreamed up called RoboPalooza. It has some of the trappings of other desert festivals, like live rock bands, food trucks and portable toilets. The difference here is that this one is sponsored in part by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – and it's focused on building a future for humanity in space. So the star performers at this festival are not musicians, but space robots and the people who spend their lives building them.

In the exhibit area, the company Astrolab is showing off its squishy all-metal tire, meant for roving on the moon. The company's business development manager, Kelly Randell, explains that the tire is intended to conform to the moon's surface, to hug the lunar dirt – and it's missing the inflatable rubber part for a reason.

"There's no AAA on the moon," she says. "So if we pop a tire on our rover, we can't just go fix it."

Nearby, the University of Alabama Astrobotics team is demonstrating what a robot nicknamed "Turbo" can do. It's about the size of a large dog with four metal wheels and built to dig moondust. As it lowers its digger head to the ground – essentially a conveyor belt of tiny buckets – it excavates a small hole and dumps a pile of powder behind the rover.

The University of Alabama team showcase their excavator robot.

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"Turbo was designed to collect a bunch of moon dirt and drive around and build a berm, which is basically just a big pile of dirt," team member Randie Jo Evans said.

This, on a much larger scale, might someday be the way space agencies and private companies build structures for astronauts on the moon – and beyond.

"There's massive radiation in space that will give you cancer," Mueller says. "So we need shelter, we need radiation shielding."

Mueller imagines that in the not-too-distant future, the moon will be a rest stop – a sort of gas station in space – as people travel from the Earth to Mars and the asteroid belt. Some people may just stop by the moon, but others, he says, will want to work and play there. "Imagine playing basketball on the moon," he says.

But someone has to build the basketball courts, the roads and the housing. Mueller says that's where the robots come in – swarms of them.

The festival operates in Lucerne Valley in the Mojave Desert, in a location that mimics Mars's harsh terrain.

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Raymond Alva for NPR

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Representatives from Honeybee Robotics show off robot components.

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"The robots will build the infrastructure," he says. "They are good at building infrastructure. They don't complain. They work 24 hours a day."

Robots can also be built to withstand the damaging radiation in space. The problem is, the space robots we have today are slow — incredibly slow. NASA's Opportunity rover, which has traveled farther than any other rover on Mars, rolled about 28 miles over roughly 14 years. Average it out, and that's a ground speed of about 2 miles per year.

Or, as Mueller puts it: "They literally drive at a snail's pace."

And if a snail were to race one of NASA's science rovers, Mueller guesses the snail would win – because it doesn't need to wait for instructions.

"The robot needs instructions from people. The crew in mission control sends instructions to the robot, and there's a time delay on Mars…up to 40 minutes," he added.

Long distances in space mean communication delays because information can't travel faster than the speed of light. For teams controlling robots on Mars, that might mean sending a command one day, waiting for the rover to respond, and sending a new command the next day.

The intricate details of the Helelani rover.

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Raymond Alva for NPR

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True, Rome wasn't built in a day. But with construction delays like this, it would never have been built.

"You can't do it at a snail's pace," Mueller says. "You have to move faster. But to move faster, you need a higher level of autonomy. And so that's what we're trying to do here in the desert, is test these robots."

In an old trailer near the rover racecourse, a couple of students from Cal Poly Pomona are hunched over their laptops, sending commands to the Helelani rover. They can't even see the racecourse from where they're seated inside a trailer, relying solely on live video feeds from the rover to steer it through the dust. It's slow work, and the rover travels in fits and starts. It takes a while for the team to figure out where to go next and to transmit a new command to the rover. The team's halting progress demonstrates the types of delays that would hinder construction in space.

But there's a certain magic to this race, too. Six other teams are running the rover through the same race, and they're doing it from thousands of miles away, in places as far as Chile and Australia. After all, if we can control robots in space, why not try to control them from the other side of the planet? It's the team from Western Australia that wins the competition, with a finishing time of 20 minutes 10 seconds.

Students from Cal Poly Pomona strategize while piloting the Helelani rover.

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Raymond Alva for NPR

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The Helelani rover getting ready for the competition at Peterman Hill in Lucerne Valley.

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Raymond Alva for NPR

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They're getting a $5,000 prize for their effort. But the lessons for the engineering community – and the insights about designing more autonomous machines – might be worth more.

"Giving the rover the opportunity to go off on a longer leash is scary," says Brad Dixon, an engineer from the winning team. "But the more this becomes popular —when people are familiar with controls and hazards — those risks become smaller."

As a local rock band blares on at the stage, half-drowned out by the desert wind and the hum of generators, Mueller leans back against an old RV – his home for the last few days – and gazes at the desert. Even as a space evangelist, he says he won't be the first in line to make a home in space.

"I don't really want to live on the moon," he says. "I love this blue planet, this pale blue dot. It's just so beautiful." But he says humanity's motivations are different.

"It's our human spirit to be explorers," Mueller says. "We don't know why we're going or what will happen. That's why we go. If we did know, we wouldn't have to go."

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NASA technologist Rob Mueller says that this silty dry lakebed in the Mojave Desert is a pretty good analog for adventures on another planet.

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Raymond Alva for NPR

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California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024