Astronomers use artificial intelligence to spot 6,000 new craters on the Moon


One of the biggest challenges in astronomy is also the most obvious: space is big and it takes a long time to look at it all. This is why artificial intelligence has been such a boon to this science. It turns out that the same machine vision tools developed for tasks like guiding self-driving cars are also perfect for sorting through vast amounts of astronomical data. So much so, that astronomers announced this month that they’d used AI to find 6,000 new craters on the Moon.

Now, this isn’t that significant in itself. The Moon is estimated to have hundreds of thousands of craters, mostly caused by impacts with asteroids and meteors. This is because of a few factors. First, because the Moon has no atmosphere these objects have a free path...

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via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2GTbiBh"

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