NASA explains how AI is physically looking for life on another planet

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken over the tech industry to the point where even someone who isn't interested in the developments of technology has heard the term "AI".

AI, or machine learning, has been around for quite some time but just wasn't a popular engineering term. Nonetheless, developers and engineers have been using machine learning in various ways for many years now, and one industry in particular, space exploration, adopted the technology as soon as it was possible as it enabled rovers and landers to carry out landings and surface movement autonomously.

NASA's Perseverance rover is one of these off-world rovers, and for the past three years, it has been testing out an AI that enables the rover to search for and identify specific minerals and rocks embedded in the surface of Mars. The system uses an instrument called the "Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL)," which is a spectrometer that uses light to identify the composition of a rock.

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This software is called "Adaptive Sampling" and siphons through the data collected by PIXL to identify any outliers that are worth further investigation.

"We use PIXL's AI to home in on key science," explained PIXL's principal investigator, Abigail Allwood of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. "Without it, you'd see a hint of something interesting in the data and then need to rescan the rock to study it more. This lets PIXL reach a conclusion without humans examining the data."

Notably, the system is all running aboard Perseverance and doesn't require any Earth intervention at all. This is particularly useful as it increases the frequency the instrument can be operating as it doesn't require timely communications between Mars and Earth, and the likely time-consuming process of humans selecting target sites for prospecting.

"The idea behind PIXL's adaptive sampling is to help scientists find the needle within a haystack of data, freeing up time and energy for them to focus on other things," said Peter Lawson, one of the developers of the software. "Ultimately, it helps us gather the best science more quickly."

"PIXL is kind of a Swiss army knife in that it can be configured depending on what the scientists are looking for at a given time," said David Thompson, who helped develop the software. "Mars is a great place to test out AI since we have regular communications each day, giving us a chance to make tweaks along the way."