NASA is also planning to launch a challenge for the public and scientific community to design a self-assembling robot with Artificial Intelligence which can explore the surface of the Moon, William Harris the CEO of the Space Centre Houston said on the last Tuesday.
Space Centre Houston in America, the Official visitor center for the NASA Space Centre, conducts the regular public outreach programme to engage people of various ages and a wide range of diverse backgrounds in the scientific research. These programmes encourage students and scientist to ideate the latest innovative solutions for the problems that the US space agency is trying to overcome in order to carry out the successful space exploration missions.
“The next challenge is for the Moon — it will be announced next year — to develop a self-assembling robot or rover on the Moon’s surface that has an artificial intelligence platform so it can make decisions based on what it is learning about the lunar surface,” Harris told PTI in an interview here.
“The reality is when we sent humans to the Moon back in the 1960s, just going there and coming back safely was a huge accomplishment. We did not do a huge amount of science during those missions,” he said. Most of the astronauts then were test pilots. The first and only scientist to have visited the Moon is Harrison Schmitt, an American geologist, who is now the last living crew member of Apollo 17, Harris said.
There was a very little scope to perform the scientific experiments and to date, there is a wide lot of things which we did not know as of now about the Moon, he said. Moreover, the astronauts that NASA recruits now are a scientist. With tie set of plans underway to take humans back to the lunar surface, the US space agency is working on efficient technologies which can help to assist astronauts to conduct the scientific experiments on the Moon.
