NASA Developing AI Chatbot to Assist Astronauts
NASA is working on a natural-language ChatGPT-like interface that will enable astronauts to carry out maneuvers, experiments, and other tasks, according to The Guardian. Despite the skepticism ingrained in us by movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, which portrayed AI in space as untrustworthy (“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave”), AI has significant benefits for both manned and unmanned missions.
“The idea is to get to the point where we have a conversational interaction with the space vehicles and they [have] also talked to us about alerts, interesting discoveries that they see in the solar system and beyond,” said Dr. Larissa Suzuki, speaking at the IEEE meeting on Next Generation Space Communications. “It’s definitely not science fiction anymore.”
NASA aims to place the system on the Lunar Gateway, a space station that orbits the Moon and supports NASA’s Artemis mission. It would use a natural language interface that would allow astronauts to ask for advice on experiments or perform maneuvers without diving into complex manuals.
NASA wrote on its page asking for small business support for the Lunar Gateway that it would require artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to manage various systems even when it is empty. These include autonomous functions of science payloads, data transfer prioritization, autonomous functions, Gateway health management and more.
For example, Suzuki outlined a scenario where the system automatically corrects data transmission disruptions and inefficiencies, as well as other types of digital outages. “We can’t send an engineer into space every time a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow,” he said.
