Can AI control a spacecraft? Currently, all spacecraft are controlled manually by engineers on Earth. But when a spacecraft travels far away, it becomes impossible to control them in realtime. A satellite flying near Europa's orbit will take about 45 minutes to send its radio signal to Earth. That means scientists have to wait about 2 hrs to control the satellite. If a water plume appears suddenly, and the satellite can immediately fly into it, it could collect valuable data which it could send to Earth. For such a task, it would definitely be needing AI systems that can act in realtime. But current top robotics AI foundational models are trained on datasets collected from Earth. It's trained to understand that if it drops a ball, it will fall down. But in space, it will keep drifting. But there are no such datasets. So companies are creating new datasets to make robots work in space. So a company called Icarus Robotics came up with a new solution. They built a robot that could be controlled by engineers on Earth. Then they send it to space. We are now using it to do grunt work like repetitive transporting cargo, repairing things, unpacking inventory, basic station maintenance. An astronaut in space costs about $130,000 per year. So by using robots instead, companies could save money while collecting datasets to train future robots that can be completely autonomous in space. pic credits : https://www.ku.ac.ae/