Artificial intelligence has managed to pave the way for endeavors that need careful consideration and it seems that AI is now responsible for space discoveries as well. A new technique that was based on AI helped them map 6 thousand new crates on the surface of the Moon.
How do they count craters on the moon?
Mohamad Ali-Dib shed some light on how this all happens. He said that usually they have to look at an image up close and map out manually the number of craters that they find on there. The process is not only time consuming but it also strains the eyesight of those that are involved. Ali-Dib, a scientist at the University of Toronto, said that they have finally found an algorithm that relies on AI in order to automatically count the craters and save up a significant amount of time for scientists.
In the past there have been numerous attempts at this but they seemed to fail more often than not.
Ali-Dib’s technology
The technology that he developed is so good that not only can it map out the surface of the moon accurately but it can also map out the surface of Mars without facing any significant problem along the way. It works so well that it is able to discover twice as many craters as one would usually find out manually.
How does it work? Well, the technology uses a convolutional neural network, the same technology that has been successfully use for self-driving cars and the one that scientists use to power robots with. If they have a map of all the craters on the Moon, with their specific size and shape, scientist have an easier time determining how they came to be in the different stages of the formation of the solar system.
