Home » NASA asks citizen scientists to help train Mars rover | TechNews

NASA asks citizen scientists to help train Mars rover | TechNews

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NASA asked citizen scientists to help “mark the surface features of Mars that may be of scientific value on the images taken by Perseverance.” The project is called AI4Mars and is hosted by the Zooniverse website. It is a continuation of the “with the Curiosity rover” project launched last year, which finally developed an algorithm for classifying Mars features. JPL officials who manage the Curiosity and Perseverance missions said that the images taken by Perseverance will expand the types of identification tags that can be used to identify features on the surface of Mars, which can further strengthen this algorithm.

This tool generated from Curiosity images is called SPOC (Soil Attributes and Object Classification). It analyzes features such as sand and rocks based on artificially marking nearly 500,000 images. JPL officials said that this tool can correctly use these functions 98% of the time. The driving engineers of the Mars rover are already using SPOC to plan the route of the rover.

Perseverance has 23 lenses and sends dozens to hundreds of images to the Earth every day. The mission team hopes to shorten the time it takes for the images to be sent back to Earth and upload instructions to Perseverance, which may take several hours. , Because engineers and geologists will search for specific features of interest in the photos, as well as the terrain that may be dangerous for the rover to cross, to plan the next path of Perseverance.

It is impossible for any scientist to carefully check all the new images returned every day in such a short period of time. If there is an algorithm that can assist the scientific team to study and identify these areas in more detail and quickly, it will save a lot of time.

Marking such geological features will help future space missions that continue to search for life on Mars, including a series of rover, orbiter, and sample-returning spacecraft, all of which are expected to reach Mars in the next decade.

(This article is reprinted with permission from the Taipei Planetarium; the first picture is September 10 this year, Perseverance took a selfie on a rock nicknamed Rochette; source: NASA)

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