NASA's AI scientists formed a club to dream up self-replicating robots and harpooning comets

A lot of the projects at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab are considered "moonshots," but some ideas developing in the lab are so far-flung that the brains behind them don't want to involve the agency's top brass at all. To conjure up ideas outside of the space agency's regular mission cycle, top minds from JPL's artificial intelligence research teams have formed an informal group to talk about the big questions, like how autonomous robots could help space exploration around distant stars and methods for leveraging huge celestial bodies to carry our AI around the solar system. "We have a little skunkworks project here at JPL that we call'AI moonshots,' which has nothing to with the moon," JPL AI head Steve Chien tells Quartz. "It has to do with a bunch of AI people thinking about'What are ways we can have tremendous impact on NASA's mission?'" Chien says they've discussed concepts like robots that can convert near-Earth objects like asteroids into antennas; robots that self-replicate by using found materials to 3D-print new robots; autonomous exploration of still-undiscovered Planet 9; and even hitchhiking on passing comets. NASA spacecraft already work with some autonomy, Chien says, and building fully-autonomous models isn't necessarily a technical limitation--being able manually control the spacecraft's movement ensures good science.