Technology advances so fast, that the world is no longer big enough to contain humanity's desire to venture onwards, and upwards, and beyond the atmosphere.
This has been depicted for more than many times in science-fiction films, and apparently, humanity's imagination about the future is inline with what humanity is capable of, if they're given enough time to advance.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, a sentient supercomputer, HAL 9000, is capable of conversationally speaking to mission pilots on a Jupiter-bound spaceship, executing their orders and alerting them to onboard faults, before eventually going rogue.
Because space is the 'final frontier', Nasa, the independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civil space program, said that it's developing its own ChatGPT-style interface that could ultimately allow astronauts to talk to their spacecraft and mission controllers.
Read: OpenAI Upgrades GPT-3, And Announces What It Calls The 'ChatGPT' AI
The goal is to give astronauts the ability to converse with AI-powered robots when they explore distant planets and moons.
Speaking at a meeting on next-generation space communication at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in London, Dr Larissa Suzuki, a technical director at Google and a visiting researcher at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said that:
"It’s really not like science fiction any more."
She envisioned how astronauts of the future will be able to talk to a computer, and seek advice on space experiments, or on how to perform complex maneuvers.
This system shall have a natural language interface that will allow astronauts and mission control to talk to it rather than having to scour cumbersome, technical manuals for relevant information.
During the event, Suzuki also outlined how the interplanetary communications network with inbuilt AI can detect, and possibly fix, glitches and inefficiencies as they occur.
"We cannot send an engineer up in space whenever a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow."
The biggest issue they have to tackle, besides integrating the AI into whatever it needs to be connected to, is how to deploy a sophisticated machine learning technology into a place without access to supercomputers.
Suzuki described an approach known as federated learning, where a fleet of robotic rovers seek out water or specific minerals on a distant planet, and share knowledge about it.
Researchers have to find a way to make the AI continue to learn, but without having to beam vast amounts of data back to Earth.
At this time, communications that happen outside Earth use what's called the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which utilizes a collection of big radio antennas in different parts of the world.
Uplink and downlink using this method has a data rate that is a lot more restricted than that on Earth, making data transmission for the AI to learn effective ineffective.
"The spacecraft do collaborative updates based on what’s seen by other spacecraft," she said. "It’s a technique to do distributed learning – to learn in a collaborative way without […] bringing all that data to the ground."
According to NASA, so far, technologies can only operate on their own to a certain extent.
However, technologies are usually limited to one specific function, like navigation and requires a certain amount of human involvement.
An early incarnation of the AI could be included on Lunar Gateway, a planned extraterrestrial space station that is part of the Artemis program, according to the engineer developing the technology.
On a dedicated page soliciting small business support for Lunar Gateway, NASA wrote that it would require AI and machine learning technologies to manage various systems, including autonomous operations of science payloads, data transmission prioritization, autonomous operations, health management of Lunar Gateway and more.
This is not the first attempt at implementing AI to help with NASA missions.
In 2022, Lockheed Martin as well as Amazon’s Alexa and Cisco’s Webex announced that they would be collaborating on Callisto, a technology for NASA’s Orion capsule much like Amazon’s Alexa.
Before, it was more difficult to comprehend this.
But now that ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, it's easier for NASA to picture how these systems shall be implemented aboard a space station.
The integration of AI should help ensure efficient and effective operations of the space station, paving the way for future deep space missions.
