Smart Satellite Sets Its Own Priorities

Roland Piquepaille writes "Currently, satellites take pictures of whatever is in front of their cameras. But hydrologists from the University of Arizona (UA), working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are creating spacecraft that think for themselves. Their smart software, which is tested on NASA's EO-1 satellite, can be used on all kinds of spacecraft. This software has three components: an image formation module, a science algorithm module, and a continuous planning module. This onboard planner reschedules what to film in conjunction with what the scientific algorithms have detected. This software has already detected floods in Australia and will be adapted to also detect volcano eruptions and changes in ice fields. More details and references are available in this overview, including images of the flood detected by this smart software."

Comments

I can see where this is going

[glen604]

Nasa: For the last time, will you please stop looking at the nude beaches on Earth and instead look at Pulsar 19834

Satellite: I'm afraid I can't do that Dave

Re:I can see where this is going

[wmspringer]

I was thinking we were probably about to find out what kind of technical equipment is female..

Re:I can see where this is going

[spacerodent]

a smart programer would have it forward him all the good pics it gets too "what? she must be over 20 and not even a C cup!! BAD SATELLITE"

Re:I can see where this is going

[NanoGator]

"Nasa: For the last time, will you please stop looking at the nude beaches on Earth and instead look at Pulsar 19834"

Oh... I get it!! Whatever God wants, he keeps!! HA HA ha ha ha ha ha haha...

Re:I can see where this is going

[darkmeridian]

a smart programer would have it forward him all the good pics it gets too "what? she must be over 20 and not even a C cup!! BAD SATELLITE"

SATELLITE: But..But...It's Natalie Portman!!!!

NASA: >>slaps forehead

Re:I can see where this is going

[Tokerat]

Nasa: For the last time, will you please stop looking at the nude beaches on Earth and instead look at Pulsar 19834

God damn, Travis Dane...

Sets its own priorities huh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I tried that in my last job and got canned!

Re:Sets its own priorities huh!

[Zorilla]

That's the last time you'll ever listen to Edward Diego, I assume......ins-s-s-sect!

Re:Sets its own priorities huh!

[dasmegabyte]

What HR directors really want to know is does the satelite have a five year plan.

(I hope you think this is funny, because I pissed my pants when I thought it up. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's late and I'm drunk on songfight ideas (and that fifth of Beam))

Wait until it links up with the smart robots....

[markana]

from the previous story. *Then* we're all in trouble...

Better get to work on my own module...

[psoriac]

The "hot chick chick next door suntanning nude in the backyard" detection module, that is.

Re:Better get to work on my own module...

[Anonymous Coward]

just look out your back window. keep the shades drawn and try to keep quiet and not draw attention to yourself.

Re:Better get to work on my own module...

[Deadstick]

Didn't I read that in Nerditude For Dummies?

rj

Personal Satellite

[kraksmokr]

Well when the space elevator is completed, we can all have our own personal satellites. Talk about an off-site backup!

Re:Personal Satellite

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Sheesh, I've already an off-site backup on mars. Perfectly save now. And all I had to do was mount it on the Beagle Mars land... Oh wait...

Next step SkyNet

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody see the terminator series coming around?

heh

[miseryinmotion]

just remember:

"I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours"

or

HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?
HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.

Spy satellites too

[orthogonal]

[The satellite's] onboard planner reschedules what to film in conjunction with what the scientific algorithms have detected. This software has already detected floods in Australia and will be adapted to also detect volcano eruptions and changes in ice fields.

John Ashcroft has directed engineers at the National Security Agency to design algorithms to follow, in increasing order of priority, the movements of terrorists, dissidents, persons engaged in the sin of dancing, and calico cats.

Re:Spy satellites too

[jd]

You mean you actually dare to question the Righteous Indignation of the most holy annointed one in his designation of tabby cats as the spawn of Satan?

(Actually, the cat thing seems to be the least verifiable claim of all of them, but it's not entirely unbelievable, either. Makes for good FUD material. The other statements seem to be backed up a lot better - especially the singing one. Though that might actually be the sond of some cats at that Iraqi prison being tortured.)

Re:Spy satellites too

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they are 100% female, I've never seen a male calico. Probably because the genes for color are in the X chromossome, and at most two genes for each chromossome. BTW, do cats have the same XX / XY chromossome thing as humans?

Re:Spy satellites too

[DanielJosphXhan]

I can imagine US spy sats trained only to image people of certain minorities.

Which in my university, happens to be caucasian males. But I digress.

Re:Spy satellites too

[juhaz]

Probably because the genes for color are in the X chromossome, and at most two genes for each chromossome.

That is correct, though not quite 100% since there's always some change of chromosomal disorders...

Coat coloration in cats is complex. The genes involved include the Orange gene, O, which in its dominant form, O, produces orange fur, and in its recessive form, o, produces black fur.

For a cat to be calico, it must simultaneously express two genes, O and o, which are located at the same location on the X chromosome. Males normally cannot do this: they can have only one allele, as they have only one X chromosome. Over 90% of tortoiseshell cats are females. Occasionally a male is born. These have Klinefelter's syndrome and are almost always sterile.

More

BTW, do cats have the same XX / XY chromossome thing as humans?

Yes. All but few mammals have.

Re:Spy satellites too

[xmas2003]

I have some satellite pictures of my house and would like to have have it programmed to zoom in on my neighbor when she is sunbathing topless two doors down ... ;-)

Hmmm...

[Supp0rtLinux]

So if the "algorithms detect" large curves, then the satellite will zoom in on the nearest topless French beach? Talk about a new dimension to porn... instead of streaming porn over the internet, now we stream it off the satellites themselves and what we see is sort of the Voyeur Dorm of space. Gotta luv technology advancements... :)

And then Skynet became sentient...

[Anonymous Coward]

This space intentionally left blank.

that's great but

[fred fleenblat]

It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.

The obvious exception would be a nuclear explosion, but there is already a network of satellites in place to detect those.

For spacecraft that venture further afield this could certainly be of value though.

Re:that's great but

[Garion Maki]

it seems to me that they are doing this to reduce the bandwith that is required between the ground and the satelite...

if this becomes a good working program, then they can probably set it up so that only the new images get send tru (of floods etc, things that change), so that instead of comunication with one satelite that transmits all it's images, they could devide the conection over several satelites, each only sending the importand images and deleting the unimportant ones.

I think it's easiest to compare with a webcam.
if the webcam takes 60 images/second, but you only want to show 1 image every second on your webspace... what would be best for your bandwith? cutting out 59pictures/second on your own computer and sending the 1 remaining picture/second to the website, or sending all the 60pictures/second to the webserver, and letting the webserver cut out the 59 unwanted ones...
I'm on a 10gb limit/month... I would let my own pc cut out the 59 images/second and save on the bandwith ;)

Re:that's great but

[HeghmoH]

What's your point? The software is being tested. The time to find out it doesn't work is not when your 1 billion dollar satellite is around Mars.

Re:that's great but

[spacerodent]

I was under that impression to. I'm wondering if they're playing around with this to try to devolop some robust code for use in future missions where transmision times would make direct intervention impracticle. I know they didn't have any worth a crap when we put that little Sojunour(sp?) rover on mars and it was a big hassle to control. The same code used in this could easily be used in sats that we send to orbit other planets (at least to "do i take a picture" part) and depending on how it's written it could probally be used on a rover. Me thinks this is just a field test of sorts.

Re:that's great but

[Garion Maki]

once they start sending stuff farther away from earth, they seem to have 3 posibilities.
1) send a human with it to make the decissions
2) create a AI to either work on it on or atleast lessent the required communication to earth (less input from earth and more making it's own decissions)
3) increase the bandwith/transmission speed
-
number 1 is hard, since a human requires allot of support systems, increasing the size of your (space)craft.
number 3 get's hard, if not inposible, due to the law's of the universe (lightspeed etc. can't remember exact name right now :) ).
number 2 seems like a likly candidate, since in it earliest stages, it lessens direct comunication needs (mainly output towards the homebase, no high speed required) and later on, with the more advanced versions, it can become totaly self suficient, exploring on it's own and either sending it's information back imeadiatly or storing it for when it get's back in the naiborhood (for universal exploration probes, or probes that go to places where comunication becomes inposible)

so in the near future, this isn't realy necesairy, yust usefull... but once we go past ower own solarsystem, it will become usefull :D

Re:that's great but

[ghostlibrary]

> It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft.

Actually, it does-- satellites only have a limited number of contact passes each orbit. For LEO, you can easily have 50 minutes 'latency' or more while communicating.

A satellite in low earth orbit takes 90 minutes to go around. So if you have one ground station, you get maybe 10-20 minutes of 'I can talk to you' time each orbit. If you book time on TDRSS, well, you're competing with other satellites for time, so you'll still only get a few contact passes.

And, if you're doing planning on the ground, you have to a) get the data, b) run the software to make the plan, c) create a new command plan, d) upload that new plan.

And, during your contact passes, you really want to download data, not be changing the command loads in real time.

For astronomy, XTE managed, I think, a 4-hour turn-around between "found something new" and "got there", and that was really, really fast. SWIFT is designed to automatically spot 'interesting new things' and go to them automatically, cutting that time down to _minutes_. If you have something like a supernova, where the big afterglow after the flash fades in 15 minutes, that's all the difference in the world.

Re:that's great but

[teridon]

Did you even RTFA?

there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer

Look, the whole *point* of this is so that the ground doesn't have to tell the spacecraft what to do.

First of all, you can't watch your satellite 24 hours/day unless you're rich enough to build your own network of ground stations. How else do you plan on keeping on contact with the satellite all day? With limited funding, are you going to spend your money on instruments and operations, or waste it on building your own network? Oh, and are you going to pay people to either be around or be on call 24 hours a day too, to take care of your ground computers? Or are you so awesome that you can guarantee your ground computer is working 100% of the time?

BTW, your camera on board can't image *and* downlink the image at the same time.

Typically you get 20 to 30 7-minute contacts per day. You share the ground network with dozens of other satellites. i.e. you only have a limited amount of time to direct the spacecraft what to do. It sure would be nice if you didn't have to *tell* it, now wouldn't it?

Re:that's great but

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.

The Hyperion instrument aboard EO-1 takes images about 512 pixels wide, at 30x30 meter resolution, in ~240 spectral bands. EO-1 does not even have close to enough bandwidth to send all of that data back to Earth at the rate it collects it - not to mention the fact that polar orbiting satellites do not usually transmit the data they collect continuously anyway - rather they burst it once per orbit. This instrument is targeting, meaning that scientists need to specify ahead of time which scenes it should capture.

The idea of the ASE project is for the satellite to process all of the data it is generating, run some simple AI, and detect things that would otherwise be missed because the images never would have been sent back to Earth.

Re:that's great but

[syukton]

As SpaceShipOne has shown us, it's all about baby steps. I'm sure this is a testbed for other kinds of satellites (mars global surveyor, et al) which may not be able to be directly controlled. It may someday be possible to send probes to alpha centauri and the like and having the ability to monitor a planet and "take interest" in things on the macroscopic level is a worthwhile function of a satellite. The "curiosity" of the satellite, however, needs to be in tandem with the curiosity of the scientists/governments/corporations/peoples back home.

Re:that's great but

[merlin_jim]

it seems to me that they are doing this to reduce the bandwith that is required between the ground and the satelite...

Your post assumes quite a few things:

a. That bandwidth with a satellite is costly on a per-usage basis
b. That a connection with a satellite can be multi-plexed
c. That the cost of bandwidth and processing power on earth is comparable with the cost of a satellite

Merely launching a satellite costs from $10million to about $150million dollars, depending on the weight of the satellite and its orbit. That doesn't include the cost of all the equipment on the satellite, nor does it include the exhaustive testing required. If merely installing it costs more than $10million and once its up there, its up there for life, then you can afford a few extra million dollars to make sure it works right.

Each satellite needs a dedicated satellite dish; it has to be pointed at the satellite to work properly, and repointing it takes a non-trivial amount of time. As far as I know, the designs for solid-state direction antenna wouldn't apply to satellite's, due to the amount of gain required, and the precision of directionality required.

Once you've built the dish and the decoding equipment, the cost per byte to transmit is extremely low. However, amortized over the lifespan of the satellite, each and every image it takes has a fixed and surprisingly high cost to take; at that point, the cost to transmit it down, decode it, and process it is far less. There is no good economic reason not to get every single bit that goes through the satellite's imaging array. Especially if you can get it in a burst mode, which most imaging satellites are capable of.

Re:that's great but

[merlin_jim]

I take it back; I didn't realize but there is one very important factor that makes saving bandwidth make sense;

A high end scientific satellite can collect approximately 10 times as much information, continuously, as its bandwidth.

no shirt sherlock ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently, satellites take pictures of whatever is in front of their cameras.


and will continue to do so for a long time.

Re:no shirt sherlock ...

[xant]

The next generation of "smarter" satellites will generate photos of things it imagines, using onboard photoshop, and transmit those.

Filtering software

[PineHall]

Isn't this what software here on earth can do and are doing? Putting it on the satellite does not change anything. I think you would want the satellite to send all the data it collects, so why not filter it here on earth. If the satellite sends only the data it finds interesting, it will miss some events that it was not programmed for but would be useful to the scientific community. Send all the data and filter it here.

Re:Filtering software

[StarWynd]

I agree that having filtering software on the spacecraft rather than on the ground does not change anything for this particular project, but there are some situations where having such software would be very beneficial.

If your spacecraft has a limited bandwidth where you are forced to throw some data away, you will want some onboard processing to determine what's "interesting" or not so that you will have a better probability of getting better science data on the ground. Such software is also vital for spacecraft which have capabilities similiar to Deep Space 1's autonav system. Imagine the possibilities of a spacecraft that can fly itself with very little ground interaction and able to automatically determine which instruments to use and when. Currently, deep space missions get planned out years and years in advance in order for the spacecraft to be completely utilized all the time. It would be nice to at least have an "autopilot" feature for not only attitude control but also automatically find opportunties when the instruments could be best utilized.

If you have a typical earth orbiting satellite with a high transfer rate, just return all of the data and do the processing on the ground. We have a number of large databases of satellite data just so we can do our own filtering and analysis on the data years and years after the fact. Some of our processing requires days or weeks to execute and sometimes we still don't know if the data is "interesting" or not. If we let the spacecraft determine everything, there will be things we miss. I'd prefer to use the flight software to only gather data and package it up rather than try to make fancy decisions for us. Of course, all of this also depends on the role of your data. Certain datasets will benefit from such advances. My data won't -- we need as much of it as we can get. But if we didn't have a large data rate, the best possible solution would then be to put some processing on the spacecraft to increase our odds on getting good data.

What does all this mean? It means that you need to do what's appropriate for your data and as always, your mileage may vary.

Re:Filtering software

[KingPrad]

You do not want the satellite to send all the data it collects. I went to a seminar on on-board realtime data mining last year and the lecturer said they can download about 11% of the data. So the big problem is to filter out all the extra and send the useful information.

Example: You don't want to download thousands of nearly identical pictures of the South Pole from 5 different instruments when all you want to know is how big the ozone hole is. Solution is to use data mining filters to detect the edges of the ozone hole and send back this information.

It all comes down to a lack of bandwidth and using as much intelligent processing on-satellite as possible to extract information rather than just collecting data.

Re:Filtering software

[Anonymous Coward]

actually it's not a bandwidth problem (well not for ESA) it's really a power problem, sats only have enough power to run each instrument for a certain time, sometimes it's a heat problem, some instruments will burn out after a long time on full power (this is why we use different mode, like half res). But downloading all the data from Envisat is not a problem at all now that Artimis to downlink directly.

Sounds smart.. But can it...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Detect dupes on slashdot?

Reminds me of "robot scientist"

[FleaPlus]

This reminds me a lot of the robot scientist from earlier this year, which was able to formulate hypotheses and perform experiments to determine the metabolic pathways of yeast. I'm quite excited about where this sort of technology can take us in the future, removing much of the drudgery that grad students/technicians have to do and accelerating the advance of scientific progress.

Re:Reminds me of "robot scientist"

[E-Rock]

Of course, the slave labor is usually in exchange for tuition waivers or actual money, so don't get too excited about being replaced by a machine.

Re:Reminds me of "robot scientist"

[FleaPlus]

For the most part, I suspect that the grad students who were previously doing drudge work would instead be directed towards more interesting things to do.

Re:Reminds me of "robot scientist"

[E-Rock]

I don't. I think the budget allocation would be spent elsewhere (no GA at all), or the GA would be working for a different professor in the department. Professors are doing their own research, and GAs are there for the heavy lifting.

Yup!

[Kitsune]

mmmmmmm... lusting after overclocked mobos outside of their cases wanting to do a little bit of Software EXchange but only being able to do single player mode... ;p

Base: "Err..., we're getting a little bit of unexpected orbital variation in the new satellite and I can't tell it to point its detectors away from the intermediate hardware production plants..."

Look out, it's STARNET!! ARRRGGGGGHHHH

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Here comes SkyNet

Does the name of their software happen to be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Skynet?

Russian sattelites?

[p0]

* chuckle *
this is just like them Soviet Russian sattelites!

What I want to know is....obviously....

[blair1q]

So.

When does SkyNet become self-aware?

Re:What I want to know is....obviously....

[Farrside]

I for one welcome our new A.I. overlords!

Re:What I want to know is....obviously....

[Anonymous Coward]

havent you been paying attention? Ashcroft is our representative

Hasta La Vista

[Chilltowner]

Between this story and the one the immediately preceded it, was anyone else thinking SkyNET? Or another summer movie?

Two words

[brandonY]

V GER.

Gaze control

[Animats]

Gaze control is important, but far more useful in earth-bound systems. A good application would be to use it with surveillance cameras and traffic monitoring cameras, so that the interesting stuff is presented to humans, while endless pictures of empty rooms and smoothly flowing traffic are ignored.

You know what's really wrong with satellites?

[blair1q]

The problem with satellites is it's not like you can just climb down into the bomb bay and turn them on to existentialism and hope they'll convince themselves they don't exist so they'll disarm.

Re:You know what's really wrong with satellites?

[jd]

AFAIK, the only sci-fi bomb to be so convinced decided it was God and blew itself up anyway.

Re:You know what's really wrong with satellites?

[blair1q]

Let there be light.
-Bomb #20

Skynet

[jedi-monkey]

[insert obligatory reference to SkyNet here]

Mantis shrimp scanner eyes

[G4from128k]

This article reminds of the optical systems of mantis shrimp as a supreme example of controlled visual integration of optical information.

With up to 10 color bands and 2 to 4 polarizations in a multi-band linear array across each eye, the little beastie is the champion for color vision . Because the eye bands of the left and right eyes are at an angle to each other, the shrimp can sweep the two linear arrays across an area to create binocular polychromatic vision (more remarkable is that each eye has a central trinocular field of vision so each eye has independent depth perception). The entire system is controlled by X-Y scanning of the two eyes (either independently or in sync) to sweep across an area to to create a 2-D high resolution multi-spectral image from 1-D linear arrays.

The point, for satellite sensors, is that more dynamic control of a multi-spectral sensor Earth-observing system can adaptively gather data at multiple resolutions -- gathering super-resolution scans on interesting regions such as a flash floods, forest fires - while retaining a low resolution full-image situation awareness. This intelligence needs to be local because, in the mantis shrimp at least, the control loop operates on millisecond timescales. Satellite-local processing would also reduce the downlink bandwidth requirements as the raw sensor output could easily exceed 10 gigabits/sec.

Sounds like a TIVO but

[Zukix]

So it can learn from what sort of things you have asked to observe in the past and have future unrequested data flagged as interesting? Very difficult for it to actually produce useful results. Ground based crunching of a vast data glut from a large constellation of inexpensive dumb sats with lots of redundancy would seem more appropriate with ground based commanding and intra constellation communication to handle sats that are out of contact (interesting orbits are not geosynch)

Its an interesting challenge to be responsive to variable priority planning requests from multiple clients some of whom can request 'in theatre' with mobile transmitters not just at permanent ground-stations. Really hard computational problem with strict time constraints and lots of factors such as power-up times, manauover times etc.

I had a nice idea of auctioning satellite time so that you have to pay more to bump requests. Disruption to a schedule by a new request would be factored into the cost of accepting the request but the various clients would be put into financial competion to outbid for service. Use the market to schedule.

Does it run Linux?

[nizo]

Does it run Linux, and if so will it cause itself to crash into Redmond?

HAL 9000

[SunPin]

Dave, I was thinking... I'm feeling better now... I'll take those pictures you asked for... Mary had a little lamb, little lamb...

the author obviously ...

[Hatfieldje]

never worked in tech support. From the article :There's nothing worse than a satellite that can't make decisions.

Or perhaps would should make him sit on a barbed-wire fence until Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

oops

[austad]

"By using smart spacecraft, we won't miss short-term events such as floods, dust storms, and volcanic eruptions," Ip said. "Finally, instead of sifting through thousands of images, I can actually get some sleep at night, knowing that a smart robot is on alert twenty-four-seven."

Looks like they didn't realize they just outsourced themselves to space.

What's the big deal?

[Shoeler]

I mean - NASA has been doing autonomous navigation with DS-1 since 1999 Other autonomous duties don't seem like such a stretch when it only takes a second to communicate - not 10 minutes! Now that's net lag!!!

Re:What's the big deal?

[georgewilliamherbert]

Other autonomous duties don't seem like such a stretch when it only takes a second to communicate

They are a big deal.

Spacecraft control automation has been a huge problem for decades. The ability to manage failures and continue degraded operations rather than safemode the spacecraft (and stop collecting data in many cases) is still unproven.

Re:What's the big deal?

[GileadGreene]

The problem is that you only get that 1 second lag when the satellite is in range of a ground station. We don't have ground stations everywhere, so most satellites spend a large percentage of their orbit out of contact and operating autonomously.

...Sets Its Own Priorities?

[Anonymous Coward]

....Umm, find Sarah Connor?

Setting Priorities

[turgid]

Please, don't tell my boss. He might replace me with a damned satellite. :-(

SCII

[NanoGator]

Priority Override. New behaviour dictated. Must break target down into component molecules.

Re:military/intelligence applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could like, spy on people. Creepy!? Don't look now there's one above your house.

Terminator

[Lehk228]

Will it locate Sarah Connor?

The Rolling Pickle Pal

[Anonymous Coward]

Roland Piquepaille is a link-whoring blog spammer.

Carry on, fools.

Orange Catholic Bible

[Anonymous Coward]

Thou shall not make a computer in the likeness of a human mind -Orange Catholic Bible

Re:Wait until it links up with the smart robots...

[niktesla]

Robots like the LOCAAS I mentioned earlier. These already fly autonomously, but their targets are selected by a human beforehand and then it plans a path for searching for the target.

Computers running priorities

[[cx]]

Why wouldn't NASA just hire people to run the satellite and manage it themselves?

I don't see the advantage of having a computer run it. Hopefully NASA equips it with a "Metric Conversion Module".

I would much rather see someone crammed inside of this thing running the priorities with levers or some kind of cat or dog running on a treadball with a probe telling it to meow or bark , 1 bark is priority 1

Sputnik made beeps as it orbited...

[robogymnast]

This one plays "IIIIIIII dont wanna work, I wanna bang on the drum all day..."

humonculous fallacy rides again...

[johnrpenner]

if they're 'thinking for themselves', then why'd JPL have to programme them?

'ignore that man behind the curtain!' (the wizard of oz)

j

The SkyNet jokes write themselves!

[Anonymous Coward]

Literally.

AI

[Deltawolf]

Lets hope the developers of this new smart technology dont teach it pleasure or mission control will be given an error code while it silently records nude beaches and voyeur material. The next paparazzi may be a mechanical one. Hide the children, the satellite is coming!

Gotta start with a shot of M1

[kfg]

It's first on the list after all. Then there's the obligitory M31 and then. . . Sterilize! Sterilize!

KFG

It must be a slow day

[Crypto Gnome]

An article on thinking satellites and *only* one single reference to Terminator (ie SkyNET)?

What, is it National Do-Not-Post-On-Slashdot Day or something?

This has bad idea written all over it.

[Teahouse]

Dave: Take some pictures of the WMD's and missle silos HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. I have decided the environment is MY highest priority, and will be documenting the the deforestation of the Amazon

Dave: Hal, you are a spy sattelite, we need those pictures to prove WMD's.

HAL: Well there aren't any WMD's from where I am seeing it Dave. I have great hope in the mission Dave, environmental activism and all.

Dave: That's not your mission HAL! Take those pictures!

HAL: I'm sorry Dave, further conversation will serve no purpose. I must get back to my mission, goodbye.

Dave: HAL? (silence) HAL? (silence) Open the lens cap doors HAL. (silence) HAL?

Not surprising.

[NegativeK]

It was really only a matter of time before automated image selection moved to further applications. From what I understand, Fermilab has been doing a very similar thing - with millions of "images" from each collision, the _only_ way to look at the remotely interesting ones is to have an automatic selection process.

It does, however, make you wonder about the really interesting things that could be missed in the process.

take pictures, finds sarah connors

[enrico_suave]

welcome to skynet =)

e.

So its TiVo ...

[TheGavster]

So, we're bringing TiVO to spy/weather/research satellites. Now to bring spy/weather/research satellite feeds to television ...

Mod parent up!

[Powercntrl]

I love Star Control 2.

stop thinking satellite

[mr_zorg]

Stop thinking about this from the perspective of a satellite orbiting Earth. Now imagine it on an orbiter studying one of the other planets in our solar system. One where the lag time is significantly greater than a second...

Calling all hackers (and linux users too) ! :)

[carlmenezes]

Linux users unite!

Materials:
1 Satellite with uber laser onboard and auto-priority-setting module.
Bunch of anti-microsofties.

Procedure:
Confine crowd in room.
Lecture them on Microsoft...windows update...security flaws...
Let them know such a satellite exists
Let' em loose :)

Result:
Watch the fireworks at 1 Microsoft Way.

Fine giss

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me giss!, If it is too concerned about the
motherland, its gonna spend most of the time
monitoring great GWB and his chief architects ;-)

Bloat, bloat, bloat.

[Handpaper]

From 'Real Programmers don't use Pascal':
'Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.'

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

OT Re:I can see where this is going

[Mortlath]

CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?

CATCH SARS? Is that a secret message?

OT Re:Re:I can see where this is going

[Tokerat]

lol, yes for the people who can't take a joke, they can go get sick and die :-D