Starship Asterisk*

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location.

The Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science System, or AEGIS, is being developed by the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems Groups at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to provide automated targeting for remote sensing instruments on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission.
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AEGIS operates by analyzing MER navigation camera, or Navcam, images to identify terrain features of interest – large, dark colored rocks, for example. The types of terrain characteristics to target are specified by scientists and uplinked to the robots on Mars.

RJN wrote:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/n ... 00323.html

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location.