Intelligent Beings in Space!

But as missions go farther and become more ambitious, long-distance puppetry becomes less and less practical. If dumb spacecraft will not work, the answer is to make them smarter. Artificial intelligence will increasingly give spacecraft the ability to think for themselves. "These technologies are already in operation on specific missions," said Steve Chien, a computer scientist who heads the artificial intelligence group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Scientists discussed some of the recent progress last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Baltimore.