NASA Apparently Working On An AI based GPS For Space

The contribution of location-based GPS technology has been inexplicable in the past few years. The emergence of navigation apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps has been a major breakthrough in the history of GPS navigation. Actively guiding millions (actually billions) of people around the globe to find their way toward their destination, these apps are gone mainstream and are being used humongously all over the world. Thanks to these apps, we can now find our way across any location in any city of any country. The Google CEO, Sundar Pichai revealed last year that their navigation app i.e Google Maps has surpassed the mark of 1 billion daily active users with the slope going even higher. This is quite fascinating, considering the world population is 7.6 billion.

Now imagine if we could have the privilege to do all these things in space. A team of researchers and scientists from the NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) are working on a space project to make it happen. Working in collaboration with Intel, the team is striving to build a GPS system for space that will help the astronauts residing in International Space Stations (ISS) to find their way across various satellites and hovercrafts. The GPS system will be powered by Artificial Intelligence and will also help various hovercrafts to easily navigate to a new planet.  

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Limitations of Current GPS Systems

The Global Positioning System, as its name suggests, works anywhere across the globe. It takes its data from the satellites and processes this data to help users find their way across a location. The problem with these systems is that they only work while you’re on Earth and won’t be of any use while you are hovering with zero gravity in space.  

NASA is intent to make a difference here and the organization believes it can be done by using the Artificial Intelligence.

Also read The AI Telescope of NASA Makes A Breakthrough In Planet Hunting.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is no doubt, playing a crucial role in building a GPS navigation system for space. As a matter of fact, AI will be the key highlight of this system and the technology is currently being used in the initial testings of the system.  

The research team reveals that if they can feed an array of pictures of the surface of a planet and its surroundings to an AI system, it can very well create a virtual map of the planet. This map can further be used to enable location-based navigation across different regions of the planet. As a matter of fact, that’s what the research team is actually doing i.e creating a virtual moon.

To create a virtual celestial body, the team first obtained over 2.4 million images of the moon surface. All these images were then fed to the AI system which compiled them in the right order to create an enormous virtual figure or the virtual moon. The team reveals that this is how they have enabled the GPS navigation across the surface of the virtual moon’s surface.

In the same way, if they can feed the surface images of any planet to the AI, a virtual map of that planet can be created which will make it a lot easier to create a navigation system for the planet. The same phenomenon can be applied to the open space where hundreds of satellites are hovering. The research team further claim that after moon, they can easily create a virtual map of our distant neighbor, Mars. Thanks to the satellites orbiting the red planet’s surface, we have enough pictures of the Mars surface to make it happen.