Our AI Research Contributing to NASA’s Artemis Space Program

By 2024, the spacecraft “Orion” developed by Lockheed Martin will bring humans to the moon in NASA’s Artemis program. The system invariant analysis technology, one of NEC’s Artificial Intelligence technologies, will perform checks to ensure that the spacecraft is tested and operating properly during the production phase.

Kevin Woodward, Space Senior Manager for AI/Machine Learning, said, “Right now our focus has been on the assembly test launch operations, and some of that includes the space environment tests and we can realize how that spacecraft will function in the environment. Exquisitely this wonderful holistic view of the system and an understanding that we have not been able to analyze or view in this way in the past. If you were to ask a human to do that same task, one person, it would take them 240 years. Artificial Intelligence does it very quickly within an hour.”

Moto Sato, a researcher at NEC Laboratories America while speaking on the collaboration said that NEC is very focused on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can explain the result. “So we are pretty much focused on the experience AI or we call the white box AI that help not only the data scientist but also the expert to understand what the result how the results come from the AI. So we as an NEC, we are not only enhancing the technology from the accuracy or performance point of view to get the trust from the human.”