NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is using AI to make autonomous decisions

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to find minerals amidst the rocks on the Red Planet, according to a website post by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Southern California. NASA says that it’s the first time AI has been used on Mars to make autonomous decisions “based on real-time analysis of rock composition”.

The Perseverance Mars rover uses software that supports a spectrometer called PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry). The PIXL spectrometer is attached to the end of the rover’s robotic arm. The AI in PIXL helps the Mars rover map the chemical composition of minerals across the surface of a rock and “allows scientists to determine whether the rock formed in conditions that could have been supportive of microbial life in Mars’ ancient past”, said NASA in the post.

Adaptive sampling

The software in the Perseverance rover “autonomously positions the instrument close to a rock target, then looks at PIXL’s scans of the target to find minerals worth examining more deeply. It’s all done in real time, without the rover talking to mission controllers back on Earth”, NASA explains. The PIXL AI allows PIXL to study the rock surface and come to a conclusion without having humans examine the collected data.

How AI helps PIXL

As per NASA, AI helps out the PIXL spectrometer in two ways. “First, it positions the instrument just right once the instrument is in the vicinity of a rock target. Located at the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm, the spectrometer sits on six tiny robotic legs, called a hexapod. PIXL’s camera repeatedly checks the distance between the instrument and a rock target to aid with positioning”, said the US Space Agency in the post.