How NASA Uses AI in Space? 8 NASA Robots That Will Study The Mysteries Of Space

8 NASA Robots That Will Study The Mysteries Of Space 

In February of 2011, the International Space Station was home to six astronauts and one Robonaut. Not to be mistaken for a spaghetti-legged member of Daft Punk, NASA's Robonaut 2 was actually the first humanoid robot ever sent to space. Clip: And are you sure this guy isn't related to Hal? Narrator: It spent about four years on the space station before it had a hardwire malfunction in 2015, and then another three years lying broken and creepy until NASA retrieved it in 2018. After a round of repairs, it's set to return to the space station later this year, but it might not be alone, NASA has a full slate of other wonderfully weird robots it wants to send to space in the near future, and luckily none of the rest participated in a beefcake photo shoot no one asked for. This is Dragonfly. The first multirotor vehicle from NASA that will ever set foot, er, ski, on another planet. Part robot, part space drone, Dragonfly will make the 759,000-mile eight-year journey to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Rivers, lakes, and seas across its surface are filled with not water, but liquid methane and ethane. Titan is the only place in the solar system besides Earth with standing bodies of liquid. But there are places along the surface that contain evidence of past liquid water and the complex molecules key to producing life, that's what Dragonfly is after. During a 2.5 year mission, the rotorcraft will land in the Shangri-La dune fields and make its way to the Selk impact crater where scientists believe the ingredients for the recipe for life once existed. The coolest part? Titan has the capacity for life as we know it, and life as we don't. The evidence of water shows habitable conditions for life-forms similar to those on Earth, but the liquid methane and ethane could also be home to life, just nothing we've ever seen before. Dragonfly will focus on both in order to better understand the origin of life in the universe. It's set to launch in 2026 but won't arrive until 2034. LEMUR is more like the mother of robots than its own thing, but we're counting it anyway. LEMUR stands for Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot, it's got four limbs and was originally conceived as a repair robot for the International Space Station. It uses 16 fingers covered in hundreds of tiny fishhooks, plus a sprinkle of artificial intelligence to scale walls and avoid obstacles. The original project ended in 2019, but technology from LEMUR is being used in other robots that still have the potential for space travel. The Ice Worm could be the name of a terrible superhero, but in this case it's a little squiggly robot. It's derived from a single LEMUR limb and it moves by scrunching and un-scrunching, just like an inchworm. It's part of a family of projects in development to explore Saturn's and Jupiter's icy moons. The worm drills into the ice, end over end in order to climb or stabilize itself while collecting samples. It also inherited its mama's AI, which helps it navigate by learning from past slipups. Another LEMUR kid is the RoboSimian. Originally designed as a disaster-relief robot, this humanoid bot has the same four limbs as LEMUR, but its feet are a little different. Instead of grippy feet, the robot, nicknamed King Louie, has wheels made with piano wire that help it roll over uneven ground. That's especially helpful in icy environments like Saturn's moon Enceladus, which is what it's being developed for now. RoboSimian can walk, crawl, inch, and even slide on its belly like a penguin. All to meet the challenges presented by silty, breakable ground. Some micro-climbers use LEMUR's fishhook technology to cling to rough surfaces; others use gecko-like adhesive to climb smooth walls. All of them are pocket-sized vehicles strong enough to survive 9-foot drops. The gecko-inspired tech relies on van der Waals forces, which are basically what happens when you stick a balloon to your head with static electricity, but on a molecular level. NASA hopes to use these little guys to repair spacecraft or explore hard-to-reach spots on the moon, or Mars, or anywhere really. Arguably the most famous robot on its way to Mars is the Mars 2020 Rover. It's about the size of a car: 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, and 2,314 pounds of pure robot. It's based on Curiosity, the NASA rover that landed on Mars in 2012. Relying on a proven system cuts down on costs and risks. The new rover will continue to search for past and present habitable conditions and signs of life. But it's bringing to the table a new drill that can bore holes in the surface and store the soil and rock samples for later use. Potentially a transport from Mars back to Earth so they can be studied in labs, but the rover won't be roving all alone. Inside the Mars Rover will be a little MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. Its job is to prove it can make oxygen on Mars for fuel and breathing - like a happy little robot plant. Mars' atmosphere is made up of about 96% carbon dioxide, no good for humans. This car-battery-sized version of MOXIE will only be able to produce about 10 grams of oxygen per hour. Future oxygen generators will need to be about 100 times larger for manned missions. Introducing the Mars Chopper. The small, solar-powered helicopter will, fingers crossed, be the first in history to prove heavier-than-air vehicles can fly on other planets, and that's basically its sole purpose. Just like MOXIE, it will act as a proof of concept for future missions. The challenge is that Mars' atmosphere has 1% the density of Earth's, making it nearly impossible for helicopters to fly at all. So far it's passed a number of important tests that give scientists hope that they'll be able to defy the laws of physics. But even if it can't fly, the chopper will basically be the parrot to the Mars Rover's pirate. Engineers are developing grippers that will allow the copter to cling to cliffsides, a lot like a bird perches on a branch, and surprise, it's another LEMUR baby. Its feet use the same fishhook technology as the four-limbed bot. There's one more robot already up in space that needs to "bee" included. It's called Astrobee, and I think that's reason enough for why we have to mention them. There are three Astrobees: Honey, Queen, and Bumble, obviously. Bumble and Honey shot up to the Space Station in April 2019, and Queen followed regally in July. The free-floating cubes were designed to alleviate some of the more routine tasks that astronauts complete daily, like taking inventory or moving cargo. But they'll also be competing with Robonaut 2 for the title of Weirdest Robot in the International Space Station.

 How Nasa Uses AI in Space?

What could be cooler than robots in space? Today we'll also talk about AI and Space, two of my favourite passions. But more specifically we'll discuss how NASA uses AI in space. So this will be part one of the article and we'll talk about AI exploration in two categories: Planetary Science and Space Communication. So Let's talk about AI application in planetary science. In order to learn more about Mars, NASA scientists often look at surface changes as a result of avalanches, sandstorms and meteorite strikes. One such surface change is the creation of craters. These scientists have previously discovered thousand new craters by manually inspecting images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This spacecraft was orbiting Mars for around 14 years. 

So that's a lot of images with potential craters in them but the one problem is that it takes scientists up to 40 minutes just to inspect one image for any craters. So to speed up the process JPL engineers made use of AI. They built a crater classifier. So they fed this classifier 6800 images with and without craters. After the training, the algorithm was then tasked with finding craters in 112 000 images and it took only 5 seconds per image as opposed to 40 minutes by a human being and that's an improvement of 480 folds. In this scenario it's not hard to see how AI has effectively levelled up our ability to automate the manual task. The next category of AI application is Space Communication. Currently communication with satellites around earth is done using human controlled radios at predetermined frequencies. In US, the federal communication commission allocates different sections of the electromagnetic spectrum to various users. These users can include satellite radio, mobile networks bluetooth and wi-fi devices. As the spectrum is divided up into a limited section there's a limit to how many channels you can have. NASA has been looking at a new type of radio called cognitive radio. It uses AI to discover in real time underutilized frequencies to use until the primary user is back. This involves an intelligent switching of channels. Another advantage of cognitive radio is that it can work around severe space weather. For example, an excessive solar flare can disrupt transmission on certain frequencies so the cognitive radio will be able to switch in real time from a faulty frequency to one that is functional. So these are two of many categories where NASA is using AI. In future parts I'll talk more about AI applications in the field of navigation, attitude control and determination and outer space exploration. If you enjoyed this article don't forget to rate us and subscribe and I'll see you in next article.

There are 8 robots on Mars RIGHT NOW!

This week I'm talking about Robots On Mars! With all the talk of humans one day going to Mars, who are the living, breathing, well, okay, communicating and sciencing robots that are on the Red Planet right now? It may surprise you to hear that there are actually 8 "living" robots, so to speak, on the surface and orbiting Mars at this very moment. You probably remember Curiosity. Curiosity is this adorable, cute, awesome rover that landed on Mars in 2012, thanks to the help of a guy with a mohawk and many others at NASA. 

Curiosity is now drilling holes on the surface of Mars and being very sarcastic about it on Twitter. But as much as I love Curiosity, there's an even more adorable rover, in my opinion, on Mars that's been kickin' it on Mars since 2001, so an incredibly long time. It's Opportunity. Opportunity is an adorable rover that has actually been roadtripping on Mars for quite some time. It's actually roadtripped on Mars for 40 kilometers, which might sound like a small amount but it's actually farther than any space probe has driven anywhere in our solar system ever. As Opportunity has been roadtripping across Mars, it has discovered a bunch of really cool things. Maybe not the weird things that you might discover on an American roadtrip, but more things like discovering that Eagle Crater was once the shoreline of a salty Martian sea. Rovers are pretty cool but one of my all-time favorite space probes at Mars is MRO, which stands for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and if you ever wonder how we get all those incredibly gorgeous photos of Mars or how we figure out where to land future space probes and humans, that's all thanks to MRO, the epic workhorse of a space probe at Mars that has been there since 2006 and definitely has been putting in a lot of overtime. I definitely think MRO doesn't get enough recognition for all the cool stuff it does. It can image details on the surface of Mars as small as a kitchen table, while orbiting Mars every 112 minutes. That's pretty cool and it also helps us do a lot of communication relay between the robots on Mars and Earth so we can better chat with all these robots that are hanging out at Mars all the time. Another long-timer at Mars is 2001 Mars Odyssey, which has been orbiting Mars for as long as well, you guessed it, since 2001, which makes it the longest surviving space probe to be orbiting another planet. It also acts as a communication relay for Curiosity and Opportunity and also discovered a huge quantity of ice at the polar regions on Mars. Mars Express is the second oldest active space probe at Mars, having arrived in orbit in 2003. Mars Express does a bunch of awesome things like create topographical maps of Mars, study its ancient volcanoes, and also check out its moon Phobos. The newcomers to Mars are Maven, the Mars Orbiter Mission, also sometimes referred to as Mangalyaan, and also the ExoMars Orbiter, also referred to as the Trace Gas Orbiter. The ExoMars Orbiter is studying Mars' atmospheric gases that could could perhaps point to biological or geological phenomena that's taking place. Maven is also studying the atmosphere on Mars to learn more about the history of the Martian climate. Mangalyaan is India's first interplanetary space probe, doing a lot of things like testing technologies to figure out how they could send future space probes to Mars. While its at Mars it's also studying Mars' surface and atmosphere as well. So, those are the 8 active robots at Mars right now. I absolutely adore knowing that there is a planet with 8 robots at it that are still talking to Earth. It's pretty cool. So, if you want to learn more about these space probes and what they're up to lately, head on over to https://pooruk.blogspot.com/ where you can learn more about the probes, learn about latest news and what they're up to and also buy some cool space stuff from our shop. Welp, that's it for me this week Space Friends. So, I hope you enjoyed, and remember to subscribe onblog and join my team to help support articles like this one.

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