A Summer of Space Exploration with Intel and NASA - Intel Nervana

This summer, Intel has been collaborating with the NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL), an AI R&D accelerator targeting knowledge gaps useful to the space program. The NASA FDL, hosted at the SETI Institute, was established to apply AI to five specific challenges in areas relevant to the space program: Planetary Defense (defending the Earth from potentially hazardous asteroids), Space Weather (better predicting solar activity) and Space Resources (locating and accessing the resources we'll need to go back to the moon and expand into the solar system). Earlier this summer, we introduced you to this collaboration, and we have exciting updates to share. The NASA FDL team successfully applied the Intel Nervana Deep Learning platform to automate the creation of lunar maps at our Moon's poles – a critical step in helping both identify potential landing sites and navigation in the shadowed regions of the moon. Here, permanent darkness and extremely low temperatures make for an ideal location for water ice (and other volatiles), but highly challenging conditions for future missions that would be impossible without detailed mapping.