AI Facilitates Imaging Solution to View Moon’s Shadowy Craters

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making waves in recent years. Recently, advances in AI have allowed us to make progress in all kins=ds of disciplines, and space exploration is one of them. From designing missions to clearing Earth's orbit of junk, AI is facilitating efficiency, which has been acting as a catalyst to the progress of space exploration.

Space researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany recently published their paper highlighting their research and initiative on developing a solution integrating AI that will enhance space imaging to view the moon's shadowy craters. Horus (Hyper-effective nOise removal U-net Software) is a machine learning algorithm that enables these dark craters to be mapped out with a better resolution than it ever was before.

Scientists have been trying to learn more about the moon's shadow parts

For the past year, scientists have been researching how to learn more about these dark craters of the moon. Unfortunately, the absence of sunlight in these regions made it difficult to find out a solution. The closest the scientists ever got was when LCROSS, a NASA moon mission, sent a projectile into the crater Cabeus and analyzed the resultant dust cloud, that contained high amounts of water. But besides this, no one has been able to imagine what water is there in those craters.

It's not that there is no sunlight at all, but the absence of direct sunlight made it difficult to research about it. The available reflected sunlight bounced off nearby hills was channeled into the craters, but the images that were captured were too noisy to make out the details.

The advent of the new technology HORUS is designed to clean up noisy images. The software uses more than 70,000 calibration images taken on the dark side of the moon by NASA to reduce the heavy amounts of noise created by the light-low imagery.

This is one of the first steps towards exploring the invisible parts of the moon. With a little fortune, humans might be able to physically explore these areas safely to find out more unknown facts about the universe.