Scientists are working on ways to study interstellar objects that occasionally fly into the Solar System. This could be done by a vehicle or, rather, a group of them, which are autonomously directed by an artificial intelligence.
Interstellar visitors
Hiroyasu Tsukamoto of the University of Illinois proposes an artificial intelligence system that could honorably greet visitors to the Solar System. And it’s not about aliens at all, friendly or not. As scientists have learned over the past few years, comets and asteroids fly in from interstellar space quite often.
However, we know almost nothing about them so far, apart from the fact of their existence. And it would be interesting to determine if their chemical composition is different from what our comets and asteroids have. However, in order to do that, it is necessary to intercept them somehow, and that is very difficult.
An interstellar object appears in the Solar System unexpectedly. Its velocity vector is not known in advance. Calculating the orbit is urgent because the speed is tens of kilometers per second. It is quite difficult to direct a spacecraft to such an object and not miss.
Artificial intelligence
This is where engineers offer their solution — artificial intelligence. It should be aboard a spacecraft, tracking interstellar asteroids and comets and calculating a trajectory to rendezvous with them.
Of course, it could be done by humans on Earth. However, the researchers say that in such a case, rapid response to new data is very important, and therefore an artificial intelligence system developed by Tsukamoto called Neural-Rendezvous can do a better job.
So far, Neural-Rendezvous has been tested on the M-STAR spacecraft simulator. But in the future, it should be a true spacecraft. More precisely — several vehicles, and they should be located in space in advance in such a way as to better cover the possible directions from which an interstellar visitor may arrive.
According to phys.org
