In modern realities, if you are lost or simply cannot find the right direction to the place you need in a new city for you, you open Yandex. Maps, Google Maps or any other available GPS-based mapping application and, following a few tips, find the desired route movement. Unfortunately, no one will provide you with such luxury in space. For example, if you get lost on the Moon or on the way to Mars, then you are most likely finished. Experts from the Frontier Development Lab (a division of NASA) are working with Intel engineers to develop a solution to this problem.
Researchers have found an easy way to navigate other planets in the solar system, but the method requires the help of artificial intelligence to work. They presented their vision of interplanetary navigation at an event held by Intel.
GPS (Global Positioning System) is a global positioning system. It is a satellite navigation system that measures distance, time, and determines location in a worldwide coordinate system. The satellites calculate your location and transmit the information to your mobile device's app, giving you hints on the right direction, for example, to a newly opened restaurant. The thing is very convenient. One problem - it only works on Earth.
Since the installation of similar satellite systems around other space bodies within the solar system seems unrealistically difficult and expensive, NASA and Intel decided to develop a different method of planetary navigation system.
According to the developers, if you feed the AI a huge number of images of the surface of a space body, then the artificial intelligence will be able to determine the position of a person on this space body by the environment in which the person will be. Based on this, the system will be able to plot the desired route to a particular destination.
To test the technology, researchers from the Frontier Development Lab and Intel created a virtual moon. The digital satellite was created from 2.4 million artificial images of the moon's surface, as it would be seen from a rover camera if it were on its surface. Then they showed the AI, which, adding up all the images, deduced an overall picture of the virtual satellite. As part of the presentation, space positioning technology showed a fairly high level of efficiency and accuracy for navigation.
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In the future, the developers want to do the same, but with a real, not virtual, space body - Mars. According to experts, they have a sufficient number of satellite images of the planet's surface in order to create a sufficiently effective GPS navigation. If this is true, then the first Martian colonists will definitely not get lost on the Red Planet. To find the right direction, they only need to take a photo of the surrounding area, and the system can quickly find them.
Nikolay Khizhnyak