Nasa has developped and tested a software aboard Earth Observing-1 that uses artificial intelligence to tell apart features from others in a photograph. It has been used this spring to monitor the changes in the northen cryosphere, the frozen section at the pole. This effort is situated in the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment and has won the NASA software of the year award for 2005.
While other spacecraft only capture images when they receive explicit commands to do so, for the last year Earth Observing-1 has been making its own decisions. Based on general guidelines from scientists, the spacecraft automatically tracks events such as volcano eruptions, floods and ice formation. The most recent software upgrade allows the spacecraft to accurately recognize cryosphere changes such as ice melting.
This software uses some examples given by scientists to classify its own observations in different classes, something like an advanced Bayesian filter.
“The software has exceeded all of our expectations,” said Dr. Steve Chien, JPL principal investigator for the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment. “We have demonstrated that a spacecraft can operate autonomously, and the software has taken literally hundreds of images without ground intervention.”
Future applications of this software migh be to track dust stroms on Mars or the evolution of volcanic activities on Jupiter’s moons. Or we can hack it to filter spam instead…
August 27th, 2005 | Earth Sciences and Geomatics, General Science, Technology