NASA wants you to help drive Mars Rover Curiosity, and you do not need a driver's licence!

There is some extremely fun and good news for all those who are interested in space and especially are a fan of the fiery red planet. NASA has now come up with Artificial Intelligence that will give everyone an opportunity to drive the rover Curiosity on the planet. You can do this with the help of an online tool named AI4Mars. 

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NASA on Mars Rover Curiosity and help

The online tool AI4Mars will have some terrain features in pictures downloaded from Mars. Using this, one can train an artificial intelligence algorithm to automatically read the landscape of Mars. People will be able to investigate different rocks, the sand on the planet, and every odd-looking objects on Mars. AI4Mars is hosted on the citizen science website named Zooniverse. 

(Source: JPL/-Caltach)

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AI4Mars will help one to draw boundaries around a particular terrain that they would like to investigate. They have to then choose one of the four labels that are given on the site. These labels are important to sharpen the Martian terrain-classification algorithm called SPOC. The meaning of SPOC is Soil Property and Object Classification. 

SPOC is developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This section of NASA has managed all the agency's Mars rover missions. It labels all the various terrain types. This creates a visual map that will help tell the mission team members on which path is best to take. SPOC is already been used by the members, but the system will have some further training as well. 

An AI researcher at JPL, Hiro Ono, has shared that in the typical sense, a deep learning algorithm will need hundreds of thousands of examples to get trained in them. He gave the example of self-driving cars and their algorithms. He said that these algorithms are trained with images of roads, signs, traffic lights, pedestrians, and other vehicles.

(Source: JPL/-Caltach)

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Once SPOC is well-trained with the perfect algorithms in place, it will be able to distinguish between cohesive soil, high rocks, flat bedrock, and dangerous sand dunes. It will then send the images on the Earth. All of this will make it easier for the team members to plan the next moves of Mars rover Curiosity. Ono says that he hopes that the algorithm will be able to help with more useful tasks in the future.

The benefits of such Artificial Intelligence related to Mars rover Curiosity is that NASA will be able to extend the planners to the next Mission Mars. This Mission Mars is the Perseverance rover. The JPL volunteers are also translating the site so that participants will be able to speak their language and contribute. Languages like Spanish, Hindi, and Japanese along others are being added.

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