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The MIT boffins believe that they can use the old school's artificial intelligence to accomplish much of the hard work in the delicate task of choosing suitable landing places for spacecraft.
In an article written for the journal Earth and Space Science, US researchers described a tool for automatically examining maps of the Martian surface and determining whether the different sites would be good landing sites. The software uses fuzzy logic algorithms, introduced in the '60s and more fashionable in the' 90s.
"Traditionally, this idea comes from mathematics, where instead of saying that an element belongs to a set, yes or no, fuzzy logic says that it belongs to a certain probability, thus reflecting incomplete information or imprecise ". A researcher and senior research scientist from NASA and the National Science Foundation at MIT, explained this week.
NASA and other space agencies have slowly amassed geographical data on Mars. The researchers estimate that NASA has more than 100 Terabits of all the different orbiters, landers and rovers sent to the Red Planet, but that is not enough yet to fully determine the exact conditions on the ground.
The program divides an image of a particular region into cells, each measuring approximately 3 square kilometers. Fuzzy logic can recruit a number between 1 and 0. If the score is closer to 1, a lighter color is placed on the cell, indicating that the surface is relatively flat. If it is closer to zero, a darker color is added and indicates that the slope is steep. By shading these cells, he creates what looks like a heat map representing the best places to land a mobile.
Another algorithm is known as the brisk walking method, which calculates different paths on the Martian surface that a mobile can take once it has landed. "If you are somewhere on Mars and you get this card processed, you can ask," From there, how fast can I get to any place in my environment? And this algorithm will tell you, "said Pankratius.
The program selected different landing sites considered by planning committees and new sites that had not previously been proposed. There are other more difficult factors to consider, such as the speed of the mobile and the amount of dust on a particular site. Humans are needed to make a decision about this.
The researchers hope to collect more data to improve the program. "This will never replace the current committee, but it can make things a lot more efficient because you can play with different scenarios while you talk," concluded Pankratius. ®
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