A.I. Software To Command NASA Mission

EccentricAnomaly writes: "NASA's Three Corner Sat mission will use artificial intelligence to command three formation-flying spacecraft. JPL has a press release here. And there's more information about the A.I. software here. The software is apparently the next generation of the software used for Deep Space One."

Comments

Would you trust it with your own life?

[alewando]

That's the important question to ask yourself when you consider supporting AI-controlled space flight: would you trust it with your own life? Would you get into a spacecraft, knowing full well that what stands between you and the harsh vacuum of space is a mere handful of transistors and the linguistic excretions of a caffeine-loaded microserf. Whether these missions themselves are manned or unmanned makes no difference, because:

1. If it's used for unmanned flight today, then it'll be used for manned flight tomorrow. If you don't look forward to that tomorrow, then you should kill its seeds today.
   
2. The safety of unmanned crafts is still critical, because reckless spaceflight is expensive , in time and money. NASA budgets are shrinking everyday, so any step away from "Faster, cheaper, better" is a step in the wrong direction.
   
   And the problems don't stop there. What about the labor disputes that are bound to arise? A greater emphasis on computer-controlled spaceflight will inevitably result in cutbacks in personel, as living breathing astronauts are replaced with cyborg equivalents. And don't fool yourself by thinking they'll still need technicians to manage the cyborgs; there's a huge difference between a non-prescribing technician and a board-certified specialist surgeon, and there'll be a huge difference between a greasy fellow with a monkey wrench and today's red-blooded military men and astronauts. Besides, would the cyborgs even allow humans to tend to them? Never. It would undercut their quest for world domination and we'd learn the secrets of the rayguns they point at our heads and pancreases from global satellites in low-earth orbit.
   
   No. A thousand times no! AI has its place: on my desktop, providing consumers with cheeful and prompt advice concerning spreadsheets and form letters. It is certainly not in space, where a rogue AI would have free reign to decide to change courses or otherwise alter its mission. You may think it's fine to send an unregulated robotic probe off to Mars to collect samples, but you won't be laughing when that robot claims Mars in the name of cybernetics and starts broadcasting communistic Mars Free Radio signals at our precious bodily television bands.

Not so hard.

[Matt2000]

10 avoid $SUN
20 avoid $PLANETS
30 become $SMARTER THAN HUMAN CREATORS COULD HAVE DREAMED
40 multiply
50 goto 10

Re:Where's the source?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

NASA loves to 'commercialize' their developments. In this way, they are probably the highest profile form of corporate welfare there is. NASA does the R&D and then hands over the exclusive rights for a pittance to some commercial outfit to turn into a product.

It may be apocryphal, but I think Beowulf just barely missed being locked-up by this kind of old-school thinking. The saving grace was that most of the original Beowulf work had been done by a sub-contractor and, unlike most of the rest of the industry, NASA had not required that the sub to turn over IP rights to the client (NASA) in their contract. So once Beowulf got big, the NASA administration came around wanting to lock it up and give it to one vendor, but they were foiled by their own contract, and the contractors were able to free the source for the work they had done.

Thus leaving me free to say, "Imagine that AI running on a Beowulf cluster!"

Re:PowerPCs in Space

[laodamas]

As a member of the University of Colorado based hardware team for this flying rock and having personally researched this matter I can say that radiation should be too much of a problem. This sat will be launched from a low orbit (lower than the ISS) leaving plenty of atmosphere to absorb most of the radiation, protecting the PPC on the industrial RPX lite SPC from being damaged (of course high energy particles are still a problem). Additionally circuitry is protected in heavy aluminum shielding. Because of the short design life of 3CS, hard errors are should not be too much of an issue. Of great concern are soft errors in the kernel memory space in the onboard flash memory - if the kernel is damaged, the sat is useless as it will not even be able to be issued a new copy from the ground. Our team attempted to use Reed-Solomon encoding to correct bit-flips, but we had no driver for writing to flash during the boot sequence.

A good place to look for detailed information of this sat can be found here.

---
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path toward nerdvana. MOOOOOF!

AI = Lemon fresh scent

[MarkusQ]

*sigh* First games designers, now JPL.

What makes this "AI"? Or to turn the question around, why aren't routers and print spoolers considered AI if this is? Artificial Intelegence is a big problem; it's solution isn't hastened by using the term as a synonym for "we picked a better algorithm than you might have expected us to."

*grump*

-- MarkusQ