Artificial intelligence is finding an increasing number of applications in the space industry, including on NASA’s latest robotic Mars explorer. In Australia, it is Trellis Data that is leading our efforts in developing sovereign AI technologies.
After a seven-month journey across the vastness of space, NASA’s Perseverance (‘Percy’) rover made a textbook landing in an inhospitable crater on Mars in February of this year. The landing required years of meticulous research and planning back on Earth, but even still, not every contingency can be catered for from 250-million kilometres away. So, NASA’s engineers gave the spacecraft the ability to take care of itself – using its own artificial intelligence.
Although NASA had landed car-sized rovers on Mars before, the level of difficulty for Percy was ramped up significantly. Curiosity’s landing in 2012 was aimed at the equivalent of a 440 sq-km vacant parking lot, but Percy targeted an area of just 160 sq-km littered with boulders, gullies and cliffs.
Viking, which landed on Mars in 1976, targeted a landing region encompassing an area of 90,000 sq-km.
With the enormous distance between Earth and Mars, there is just no way to safely control a spacecraft landing on the red planet in real-time. Percy had to scan the Martian terrain and pick out a safe place to touchdown on its own.
The whole process was reminiscent of the first Moon landing. During the landing of the Apollo 11 lunar module, Neil Armstrong was looking out of the window and dodging boulders and craters while he searched for a safe landing site. The spacecraft eventually touched down with only about 15 seconds of fuel remaining.
Like Armstrong, Perseverance had memorised maps of its landing site’s surface and navigated by following known landmarks. It also had the ability to react appropriately when faced with unexpected obstacles. And so, instead of being stuck in deep sand or dangling over a cliff, Percy landed bang on target in the Jezero Crater.
The use of artificial intelligence systems didn’t end with the rover’s landing. It’s also built into Perseverance’s precision X-ray beam, PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), that will be searching for signs of past microbial life. The laser can identify features in rock and soil as small as a grain of salt, and AI will be used to guide it to get the most accurate aim.
But the US is not the only country that is using artificial intelligence in its space hardware. Trellis Data is an Australian owned and operated company that specialises in providing a platform for AI applications for the national government and enterprise, including in the space industry. We managed to organise a chat with co-founder and CEO Michael Gately who gave us some wonderful insight into how AI can be applied to solve real-world problems now, and in the future.