Went over the PARC yesterday to hear Kanna Rajan of the Computational Sciences Division of the NASA Ames Research Center discuss “From Interplanetary Cruise to the Surface of Mars – The Challenges of infusing AI in Space”.
Integrating AI into anything has always been a tough proposition, because the generalized systems solutions are always in search of a problem that can’t be solved by breaking down the problem into simpler components or by the use of sheer massive computational grit. So it was interesting to hear it used – not for complicated analysis of navigation in spaceflight, for example, as intended but instead to resolve scheduling disputes between teams sharing time on an interplanetary robot by using a “mission-critical AI application on a NASA science mission”.