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Greetings greetings, and welcome to another episode
of our series on artificial intelligence and space
exploration brought to you by Intel and the Planetary
Society.
I'm Bill Nye, CEO.
And I'm Robert Picard, AI from the future and board member
of the Planetary Society.
Today, we are joined by Emily Lakdawalla.
Emily is known as the Planetary Society's planetary evangelist,
but you've also written two books about the Curiosity
Rover.
I'm so glad that you mentioned that.
I've written two books.
The first one's called The Design and Engineering
of Curiosity, How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job.
The second one will be Curiosity and Its Science Mission,
A Mars Rover Goes to Work.
Well, those titles are almost books themselves.
I get it though.
One's about the engineering of the building of it,
and the other one's about the science of the Rover.
That's exactly right.
How Curiosity works and what it did.
Yeah, cool.
It's one robot, but it's a really big topic.
Curiosity is the most complicated mission
that's ever been sent to the surface of another planet.
It took thousands of people to build it and hundreds of people
operate it.
And none of its mission would have been possible
without artificial intelligence.
So space exploration is what we're talking about.
And artificial intelligence, that's
what we're talking about.
We can do a whole series about that.
Why, this could be one of the episodes.
What do you think, Bob?
OMG, it's like perfect.
As we have mentioned in earlier episodes,
artificial intelligence, or AI, is a remarkable technology
that can make science better and present opportunities
for new discoveries and advancements.
It's about humans getting new and better tools to do science
with artificial intelligence.
For me, these robots running code that humans wrote,
this is human exploration of Mars.
We, you, and me, and Bob, and everybody
else, we have driven miles across the surface.
We have climbed mountains.
We have drilled holes into the Martian surface,
sampled and tasted the material that we dug out
of inside of Mars.
And we have taken amazing panoramas,
these landscapes that are just so stunning and striking.
Even when we're just staying within our own solar system,
not flying off to the delta quadrant there
with the good doctor--
Watch it, Bill.
--it's challenging.
Robots and artificial intelligence
allow us to explore space safely and affordably,
and accomplish things that would otherwise just be impossible.
Emily, what kind of AI is aboard Curiosity?
Well most of the artificial intelligence on Curiosity
is aimed at helping it drive safely across the surface.
It has six cameras.
There's two high on a mast and two
facing forward and behind on its belly.
And it's using these cameras all the time to image
the landscape around it.
It's asking itself questions, like am I driving
in the right direction?
Am I falling into a hole or climbing too steep a hill?
I ask myself those questions all the time.
And you have a form of intelligence, Bob.
That's very kind of you, Bill.
Very generous.
I went with form.
But the thing is, Emily, what you're saying is--
if I understand it--
Mars is so far away that if we were to try to send it
a command-- turn left, turn right,
don't step in that hole--
it would take too long to get the signals up and down.
That's right it would take like 10 to 25 minutes sometimes
to get signals to Mars and back.
And so we just can't do that.
It would just slow the whole thing down,
so we use artificial intelligence on board
the Rover.
Curiosity has just gotten a software upgrade
or got an update.
Did you get an email?
Would you like to update now?
Would you like an update overnight?
Did it get one of those?
It actually takes four nights to upgrade Curiosity's software
because Curiosity has two brains.
They have to uplink it, install it, verify it
on each of the two brains.
It takes four [INAUDIBLE].
Bill, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is incredibly cool,
is it not?
It is pretty cool to me.
So does the Rover ever say, I'm watching videos right now.
I don't want to an upgrade, which I do [INAUDIBLE]..
Ask again in an hour.
No, it didn't.
These upgrades though, they're really--
I mean, we joke, but they're really important.
The upgrades have enabled Curiosity
to use its wheels more effectively,
prevent damage to them.
It has also enabled Curiosity to autonomously pick
targets to zap with its laser.
So we trust it driving around on another world
to shoot at rocks that it selects with a laser,
like bzzt!
We do.
It finishes a drive across the Martian landscape.
And then it looks around for something interesting,
and it goes zap.
It actually zaps it 30 times.
I mean, it's really an amazing thing.
You can upgrade software in another world,
have it zap rocks, and figure out what might be in them.
Absolutely, and that software that Curiosity is using,
it actually was tested on a previous Rover opportunity.
And now, Curiosity is taking it further
and is actually testing it for the next Mars Rover, the Mars
2020 mission.
So the AI that we're using on Mars right now
is going to enable future missions
to be a greater success.
Our partners at Intel have resources online
where you can learn more about AI
and participate in AI-related projects.
It's called the Intel AI Academy,
and we'll leave a link in the video description
for quick access.
If you've ever wanted to pursue space,
here are your next steps.
That's right, check us out at planetary.org.
That's all for this episode, but come back next week.
And thank you, Emily, for all those fabulous information
about Curiosity.
Emily, final question, OK?
If we have yet to discover evidence of life on Mars,
how precisely did Curiosity kill the cat?
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