Daily Archives: April 4, 2021

Erosion can take many forms. Most commonly known is water wearing away the sides of creeks or lakes. But wind can erode just as effectively, especially if it carries dust particles that can eat away at otherwise solid objects. While this wind-driven process is most commonly observed on Earth, it plays a role in the history of most other rocky bodies that have an atmosphere. Recently, a team lead scientists from the Planetary Science Institute found evidence for some erosion from between 50,000 and a few million years ago in Marss polar ice cap. That is a blink of the eye by geological standards.

No matter how old they are, the patterns the eroding winds create are breathtaking, spiraling into what looks like a fractal pattern when viewed through the eyes of some digital mapping software. The area affected by the winds is also absolutely enormous, coming in at 10 times the total volume of the Grand Canyon.

The spiral patterns are actually troughs in the ice that form as a byproduct of the erosion processes. Those erosion processes actually carve chunks out of the polar ice cap, exposing long buried ice that is otherwise inaccessible. Models of the ice cap hint that that newly accessible ice might hold some interesting further discoveries if human or robotic explorers are able to access them.

One potential discovery is to see if the water stored in the polar ice cap is fresh water or not. Much of the easily available water on Mars has dissolved hazardous chemicals, such as perchlorates, that make it unsuitable for human use. Purifying this water to make it useable would be both energy and time intensive, neither of which will be in abundance in any early Martian colony.

Alternatively, models suggest that the ice exposed as part of the polar cap erosion process was never held in liquid form, and therefore might be free of the impurities that plague other water sources on the red planet. If that is the case, the polar cap itself might serve as a reservoir for humanitys water needs when human explorers finally set foot on Mars.

Another discovery is more scientific than practical, but interesting nonetheless. Models also suggest that the new exposed ice is ancient, dating back hundreds of millions of years. On Earth, scientists regularly drill ice cores to collect data on the paleoclimate the climate of the planet that happened before humans started keeping records. Unfortunately, these techniques are useful only back a few million years due to Earths ever changing climate.

Alternatively, the ice cores exposed through erosion on Mars might date back hundreds of millions of years, as they have not melted and reformed repeatedly over that time, as the cores on Earth have. This would be the equivalent of looking back to the climate during the time of the dinosaurs on Earth. It would provide an insight into the climate of the red planet farther back than almost any tool available currently on Earth.

That additional information is only accessible if we are able to get to the exposed ice though. For now, there are no missions planned specifically to search out these pockets of exposed ice. But if the erosion process continues, there might be some even newer pockets of it to explore when humans finally do visit.

Learn More:PSI Huge Spiral Troughs on Mars are Young, Formed by ErosionNature Scientific Reports North polar trough formation due to in-situ erosion as a source of young ice in mid-latitudinal mantles on MarsUT How old is the ice on Mars north pole?UT Heres the Best Place for Explorers to Harvest Martian Ice

Lead Image:The image on the left is a image of Mars nothern polar ice cap with digital enhancement, specifically highlighting the eroded trough spirals. The red dots denote mounds and depressions. There is an inset of Hawaiis big island for scale. The upper right image is a zoom in that is equivalent in size to the Grand Canyon (see in bottom right).credit: MOLA Science Team, MSS, JPL, NASA.

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Clear Signs of Recent Erosion on Mars - Universe Today

The surge took Dogecoin on top of the market cap of over $8 billion with a circulating supply of 129 billion. According to CryptoSlate, this is a surge of more than 3,434 per cent over the past year. However, within the past week, Dogecoin managed to grow by as much as 23 per cent.

This tweet was one of the many Dogecoin-related comments Musk has made in recent times. He once said that it would be the future currency of Earth. This particular cryptocurrency started as a meme in its initial days while carrying the famous Shiba Inu dog image.

But now, like other competitors, Dogecoin has also gained popularity and even Musk has accumulated a stack for his nine-month-old son.

But that is not the end of the Musk and cryptocurrency tale. In December 2020, while responding to a Twitter thread, started by Artificial Intelligence researcher Lex Fridman, Musk said that the future Mars economy will run on cryptocurrency.

The billionaire, who is one of the co-founders of online payments giant PayPal, also suggested that it could be Marscoin or Dogecoin.

Marscoin And Dogecoin

According to the website of Marscoin, this cryptocurrency is dedicated to supporting the Mars human colony and other space-related programmes intended to get humans living and thriving off of Earth.

Marscoin is a testbed for experimentation with technologies that might help early colonists on Mars build governance, voting, inventory tracking, trading and capital allocation, the website explained.

But it looks like Dogecoin could be a more likely candidate for a future economy beyond Earth as it is more popular than Marscoin and shares many decentralised attributes as Bitcoin.

Last year, Musk also changed his Twitter bio to "Former CEO of Dogecoin". He wrote on the social media platform, "One word: Doge".

On Christmas 2020, he tweeted, "Merry Christmas & happy holidays!" attaching an image that included the Dogecoin logo.

Read more:

Dogecoin Surges 10 Per Cent After Elon Musk Tweets That SpaceX Is Going To Put Memecoin On Moon - Swarajya

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Image credit: NASA JPL

With each new generation of NASAs Mars rovers, improvements in AI, machine learning and other advanced technologies continue to make them more autonomous as they traverse the Martian soil looking for clues about the history of Earth and our solar system.

But there is still more work to be done to give future planetary rovers even more powerful autonomous self-driving capabilities, according to Shreyansh Daftry, a robotics technologist with NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Daftry presented a talk on the topic March 31 (Wednesday) at the virtual AI Systems Summit put on by Kisaco Research.

The latest Mars rover, Perseverance, landed safely on the red planet on Feb. 18, filled with new innovations and grandiose plans for exploring the Martian surface for the next two years. Perseverance already uses early forms of AI to find its way around Mars, but like the Curiosity rover before it, its autonomous systems work at speeds far slower than if humans were on board to drive them over the surface, said Daftry.

Shreyansh Daftry, robotics technologist, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Thats where future AI, ML and other advancements are aimed at making even broader improvements as researchers and engineers look to developing better, faster rovers to work with humans as they explore planetary destinations beyond Earth's moon, he said.

My team has been working on developing autonomy and guidance that could help our rovers drive just like a human driver would, Daftry said. While we understand that it would probably take hundreds of years for AI to match human intelligence, even if it could just model some of those behaviors it would help improve the driving capabilities of our rovers so they would be able to drive significantly safer, faster and further than we do today.

To do that, much more data is required including the processing of huge numbers of images from the rover itself as it traverses the terrain, he said.

NASAs earlier Curiosity rover, which landed in August of 2012, is guided on Mars each day by a team of human researchers. The researchers upload commands to the rover to direct it where to go and what to do to accomplish its mission the next day. Those procedures are necessary due to the time it takes for data and commands to be sent or received from Earth over the 293 million miles between the planets.

This has been the typical way NASA has operated and developed missions in the past, and this has worked so far, said Daftry.

With the new Perseverance rover, however, its algorithm has been improved to allow the latest rover to be operated continuously, without having to stop to crunch numbers.

Daftry wants to build upon that progress on future rovers using AI.

Overall, our long term vision is to create something like Google Maps on Mars for our rovers so the human operator can specify the destination where they need to go, and the rover uses the software to find that spot, he said.

Making Mars Rovers Faster

While autonomous rovers today cant move as quickly as scientists would like, past space vehicles have shown it is possible, including NASAs lunar roving vehicles, which accompanied three crewed Apollo missions in 1971 and 1972.

Those lunar rovers were driven by U.S. astronauts across the moons surface at comparatively high speeds, almost 100 times faster than todays rovers can move across Mars, said Daftry.

The key difference between how Perseverance moves today on Mars and how the lunar rovers moved across the moon in the 1970s is that the lunar vehicles were powered by humans, without the need for AI, he said.

And even though NASA has built many advanced exploratory vehicles and machines in the past, they're not really what I as a trained roboticist would yet call intelligent, said Daftry.

The current operating procedures for Perseverance and Curiosity are not scalable for future missions, especially if they also involve humans traveling to planetary destinations which are even farther from Earth or setting up colonies on Mars, he said.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Image credit: NASA/JPL

There's a growing need for future spacecraft to be autonomous, self-aware and have the ability to make critical decisions on their own, despite the challenges of distance, said Daftry. Imagine having a team of 100-plus engineers and scientists sitting here on Earth, controlling each of those assets. Sounds crazy, right? The only way that we can scale up the space economy is if we can make our space assets self-sustainable. And artificial intelligence is going to be a key ingredient in making that happen.

An extension of that could be the possibilities of sending human astronauts on future missions along with robots, which would create human-robot teams that could work together, said Daftry.

A lot of the work right now is under technology development and our hope is to infuse them into our future Mars rovers in the next three to five years, he told EnterpriseAI. Some may be easier to integrate already but others may need more maturity to ensure it doesnt compromise safety. We are still far from solving the problem of trustworthy AI systems.

First versions of these coming systems may include offering suggestions to the next-gen systems to aid in decision making, and maybe eventually using black box decision-making once verification and validation steps can be incorporated, he said.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. Image credit: NASA/JPL

In some ways we have been already using AI on Mars for decades since it runs computer vision algorithms for autonomous localization on rovers, he said. The Mars Exploration Rover and the Curiosity rover have been doing fully-autonomous navigation drives on Mars for more than 10 years. We even have a computer vision-based detection system (AEGIS) that runs onboard the Perseverance rover and finds interesting rocks to sample.

These past projects have pretty much all used classical AI and robotics model-based techniques, though, said Daftry. If we define AI in the context of data-driven approaches, we are only getting started, and this is where my team and I are pushing to infuse ML/DL and data-driven approaches in general. Some technologies are easier to infuse like semantic segmentation because you can easily put safety checks on top of it. But other aspects like onboard adaptation, where you let your AI system learn in-situ, is a totally different regime because it breaks the very fundamentals of how we do system verification, and needs us to rethink how to build trustworthy systems.

Progress is being made on these projects and Daftry says his dream is to deploy the first deep learning algorithm on a Mars rover in the next three years, with extensive AI-based, on-board autonomy as a central piece for all rovers in the next 10 years.

I see this as one of the greatest grand challenges of AI and robotics in this century, said Daftry. One of the things that's very close to my heart is human exploration. I would love to work towards how these robots can become even more intelligent so that they can really work with human teams in a very seamless fashion. It has a huge potential to revolutionize space exploration in the future, but there are a lot of key challenges that still remain.

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How NASA Is Using AI to Develop the Next Generation of Self-Driving Planetary Rovers - EnterpriseAI