NASA's Artificial Intelligence Makes Planet-hunting Breakthrough
NASA will host a media teleconference later this week to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.
NASA will be holding a major press conference after its planet-hunting telescope project recently made a major breakthrough.
The Kepler space telescope is operated by the American space agency with a mission to discover other planets which might support life. The project's latest discovery is significant enough to bring with it a huge press conference.
Very little further information was given about the announcement, but it will almost certainly relate to exoplanets – Earth-sized worlds that orbit around their own stars, and are our best hope of finding alien life.
The briefing participants will be:
- Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington
- Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in Mountain View, California
- Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin
- Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley
The space agency said that the discovery was made with the help of Google artificial intelligence, which is being used to analyse the data sent down by the telescope.
By using machine learning provided by the tech giant, NASA hopes that it can pick through the possible planets more quickly and hopefully find life-supporting planets sooner.
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The Kepler telescope was launched in 2009, when scientists didn't know how many exoplanets there were. It has shown they are surprisingly common, indicating that each star might have its own planet.The spacecraft completed its main mission in 2012, but has continued to do more work. In 2014, it began a major mission called K2, which looks for more exoplanets as well as studying other cosmic phenomena.
The sheer amount of data coming from the telescope means that scientists have trouble picking through it to find the planets that might be interesting. The introduction of the use of artificial intelligence is intended to help with that, by allowing computers to do some of the work.
The Kepler mission has already led to major breakthroughs, finding that the universe is full of planets that could theoretically support life. Many of those breakthroughs are announced in major press conferences like the one that has just been announced.
The teleconference will run at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, December 14th and will stream live at:
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