NASA working towards making spacecrafts talk to astronauts: Report

Washington DC, United States

In a first, a ChatGPT-style interface is being developed by the engineers working in NASA which can ultimately make spacecraft talk to their astronauts and help mission controllers hold conversations with artificial intelligence-powered robots, which are exploring moons and distant planets, according to an exclusive report published by The Guardian.

As per the plan, an early incarnation of the AI will soon be deployed on Lunar Gateway, which is NASA's planned extraterrestrial space station and part of the Artemis programme, as per the engineer developing the technology.

“The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they [are] also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system and beyond,” said Dr Larissa Suzuki, a visiting researcher at NASA, while speaking to The Guardian. “It’s really not like science fiction any more,” she added.

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Interplanetary communications network with inbuilt AI

While addressing a meeting being held on next-generation space communication at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in London, Suzuki emphasised interplanetary communications network which will have inbuilt AI to detect, and also fix glitches and inefficiencies as and when they occur.

“It then alerts mission operators that there is a likelihood that package transmissions from space vehicle X will be lost or will fail delivery. We cannot send an engineer up in space whenever a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow,” she said.

A natural language interface will also be inbuilt in the system which will allow mission control and astronauts to talk to it and will save them from scouring technical manuals for finding relevant information. Suzuki expressed hope that astronauts will in future be able to seek advice on how to perform complex manoeuvres or space experiments.

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She added that she has been investigating how machine learning could be deployed in space and if it is possible or not to run large amounts of data through supercomputers. Suzuki added that an approach like federated learning can allow a fleet of robotic rovers, which are searching for water or specific minerals on a distant planet, to provide relevant information back to Earth without beaming large amounts of the data.

“The spacecraft do collaborative updates based on what’s seen by other spacecraft. It’s a technique to do distributed learning – to learn in a collaborative way without … bringing all that data to the ground,” she stated.