NASA scientists are trying to figure out can the computer algorithms that instruct autonomous cars to drive carefully help in identifying the nearby asteroids or notice life in the universe. For this project they joined hands with pioneers in AI (artificial intelligence) firms such as IBM, Intel, and Google—to apply modern computer algorithms on the problems in space science. The machine learning is a kind of AI. It illustrates the most extensively utilized algorithms and other devices that permit computers to learn from information so as to make forecasts and classify objects much earlier and more precisely than a human being can.
As a result, machine learning is generally utilized to help technology organizations identify faces in photos or forecast what movies people enjoy to watch. But some researchers see applications further than the Earth. Giada Arney—Astrobiologist at NASA’s GSFC (Goddard Space Flight Center)—hopes machine learning can aid her and her associates to determine a needle of life in a heap of data that will be gathered by future observatories and telescopes such as NASA’s JWST (James Webb Space Telescope). Arney said, “These technologies are extremely important, in particular for big data sets and mainly in the exoplanet field. As the data we are going to receive from future observations will be sparse and noisy. It will be really difficult to understand and hence utilizing these type of tools have so much potential to help us.”
Similarly, NASA was in news as the space agency discovered sugar in meteorites that collided with the Earth. Billions of years ago, the meteorites that crashed with the Earth comprise of sugars, scientists say lending support to the notion that asteroids might hold some of the elements to life. A team of researchers found “bio-essential” sugars within meteorites that also contain other biologically vital compounds, as per to a press release from NASA. Asteroids—which are the rocky Earth objects that orbit the Sun—are the main bodies of most meteorites. And the theory hints that chemical reactions in asteroids can form some of the ingredients essential to life.
