EMIT and its possibilities
NASA is studying minerals, dust, and potentially plastics, on land from space.
On board the International Space Station, NASA has an instrument named EMIT that studies minerals and dust that impact the Earth’s atmosphere.
Kelly Luis, the EMIT aquatic applications lead said the instrument uses an imaging spectrometer to study minerals and dust -- and how that interacts with sunlight.
“When that light bounces back to an instrument or detector, it has a very specific spectral fingerprint, Luis said. “Those fingerprints trace back to not just, like, is it a rock or vegetation or water, but it actually can start to distill what types of rocks might be there, what types of vegetation and water conditions.”
Aside from studying dust, a recent paper by Raissa Estrela, an astrophysicist and astrobiologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, found that EMIT’s instrument was able to see plastics on land.
“We know what the plastic fingerprint that's imprinted in the light that we measure with EMIT,” Estrela said. “We know exactly what color of light plastic leaves that fingerprint. What is difficult is to distinguish what kind of plastic is that one. So, we try to do that in our research, but there are many types of plastics that humans created. It brings a puzzle scientist to detect what kind of plastics are we detecting.”
These findings raise important questions like could this technology helps in other areas on Earth, like detecting plastics in our oceans or if EMIT has the potential to help clean up Earth’s oceans.
“We have all these really hard-working people trying to make these maps on the ground. And if there's another point of view from space or bird's eye that can help determine where to best allocate resources. That becomes a really powerful resource for folks.”
AI decisions on Mars rovers
The Mars rover Perseverance takes postage stamp-sized pictures of Martian soil in search of chemicals that point to former life on the red planet. And it does it all on its own.
Using an instrument called PIXL, or the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, it searches the pictures for chemical patterns selected by scientists on Earth. If it finds a match, it examines the spot further.
The rover has a limited amount of time in each location on Mars. David R. Thompson, senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said this autonomy helps get the most useful data possible in that small timeframe.
"It can acquire better quality data if you spend more time to make a measurement. If you sit there at a single spot for a long time and record a lot of X-rays, you can get very, very precise information about that specific spot,” Thompson said. “But the mission keeps moving, there's not a lot of time for all of these measurements. This was really the need for a little bit of onboard autonomy on the instrument itself to make some smart time allocation decisions to know whether a particular spot is worth lingering over.”
PIXL uses a process called adaptive sampling, analyzing data as collected by the instrument and matches it against templates that the scientists have defined.
Curiosity uses its AEGIS, or Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science to direct its ChemCam towards samples of interest. The camera then lasers off bits of rock and analyzes chemical makeup of the gas that’s burnt off.
"This is the sort of thing that would be very, very difficult to plan in advance, because the rover may be traveling through terrain that scientists haven't seen before. You know, executing it script dutifully between command cycles and the rocks that it passes we may never have a chance to see again,” Thompson said. “This lets the rover be a little bit more adaptive, just a little bit of rudimentary decision making that can help the scientists get the best quality data.”
Replacing scientists is not the end goal, according to Thompson. Scientists will continue to interpret data and decide mission goals, even as AI continues to be integrated into more space technology.
"There are simple distinctions that the spacecraft can make on its own to adapt to the data as it's coming in, as it's finding new environments, discovering new features of interest, about where to collect data and what to prioritize sending back that can improve the science yield of the mission, playing to the best strengths of both the robot and the human scientists,” Thompson said.
