NASA: AI Will Lead the Future of Space Exploration

Steve Chien and Kiri Wagstaff of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have predicted that in the future, the behavior of space probes will be governed by AI rather than human prompts from earth. While humanity has made great strides in exploring the galaxies beyond our own, in order to learn even more about our universe, we may need to hand the controls over to robots. First, probes may fall outside communications range, which means they will have to continue without instruction on their journey. That also means that eventually they'll have to work out when, and how, to return with the data they have collected. A key aspect of this is knowing which data to document, and how to identify it: for example, deciding if weather is due to a storm or is normal for the planet being observed.