Better Martian Downloading Through AI for ESA

As the European Space Agency’s Mars Express continues its hunt for evidence of past or present life on the Red Planet, AI is being used at the European Space Operations Center to give the space vehicle a boost. Mars Express generates huge volumes of scientific data. This data had to be downloaded to Earth at the right time and in the correct sequence. Such was managed using human-operated scheduling software, a tedious and time-consuming job, and was the process in use since 2005. Now, thanks to the work by Dr. Amedeo Cesta and mission planners and computer scientists at Italy’s Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology (ISTC-CNR), a new “smart” tool named MEXA2 (Mars Express AI Tool) has been integrated into the mission planning system. This tool works by intelligently projecting which on-board packets might be lost due to memory conflicts. The data download schedule and download commands generation are optimized by MEXAR2, resulting in the negation of stored data packet loss. MEXAR2 has also reduced the team’s workload by 50 percent, compare to the older, manual method. By the way, MEXAR2 recently won the “best application” award at ICAPS 2007.