New AI Mapping Algorithm Discovers 6,000 New Craters on the Moon

Researchers first trained the neural network on 90,000 images that covered two-thirds of the moon's surface before testing its ability to detect craters on the remaining third portion of the data. Officials discovered that their network was able to categorize craters larger than 5 kilometers, ZME Science reported. "When it comes to counting craters on the moon, it's a pretty archaic method," Mohamad Ali-Dib, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Planetary Sciences at University of Toronto Scarborough, said in a university press release. "Basically, we need to manually look at an image, locate and count the craters and then calculate how large they are based off the size of the image." "Here we've developed a technique from artificial intelligence that can automate this entire process -- that saves significant time and effort," he added.