In the future, when an astronaut wants to communicate with his spaceship, he will no longer have to do it with codes and commands. A chat will be enough, like with an old friend. NASA is developing an onboard computer with an AI voice interface for future spacecraft.
A bit of history
Before prefiguring dialogues with the on-board computers of future space vehicles, let's look at today. Indeed, yesterday: in June 2018, a massive dust storm on Mars it enveloped NASA's Opportunity rover, cutting off all communication with Earth. Eight months later, NASA called the rover's 15-year mission to Mars over.
Jacob Margolis, a science journalist, reported that the last message he received from Opportunity was, essentially, something like “my battery is low and it's getting dark.” The internet was on fire for these touching “last words” of the rover. Power of media and storytelling. Actually, Opportunity didn't quite say that. His last message to Earth was written in coded data that NASA engineers had to interpret, like all previous transmissions.
The new language of on-board computers
Let's move on to tomorrow: imagine a near future in which the on-board computers of rovers and spaceships can communicate with the same natural language we use to speak to each other. Understanding messages would be easier, and thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, we are getting closer to this reality.
To be precise, as stated Larisa Suzuki, researcher at NASA, during a virtual meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): “It's not like a science fiction movie anymore.” And I also hope for a different science fiction film than the one I paid homage to in the cover photo of the article (sorry, I couldn't resist).
From theory to practice
In his speech at the IEEE's Cognitive Communications for Aerospace Applications Workshop, Suzuki recounted NASA's hopes for the development of new on-board computers equipped with artificial intelligence and language interpreters.
“The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with spacecraft and they respond to us about alerts, interesting discoveries that they make in the solar system and beyond,” Suzuki said.
How long will that take? According to Suzuki, NASA engineers won't have to wait long to start having conversations with their spaceships. A preliminary version of the AI will be integrated into the on-board computer of the Lunar Gateway, the lunar-orbiting space station scheduled for launch in November next year, 2024.
On-board computer, social odyssey
The limits of AI, as you know, have not yet been even minimally explored. When operational in this field, it is not difficult to imagine that NASA will be able to exploit the space station's ability to "talk" to increase interaction with technicians and astronauts.
An automatic system, which does not have sleep problems and is properly trained, will also be able to serve as an "influencer" to increase public awareness and interest in the mission.
Maybe in the future the computers on board missions to Mars will have their own Twitter account, on which they will tell themselves how things are going. Let's talk about.
