Teams of virtual assistants will be heading out to deep space with NASA on their upcoming mission to the Moon in 2020. The assistants will help facilitate important communication between astronauts and mission control, providing additional support to the human crew. The two virtual assistants that have been chosen are Amazon’s Alexa and Cisco’s Webex. Both AI assistants will be traveling to space aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft and will be staying at the Lunar Gateway, which is scheduled to arrive at the Moon in 2022 and begin construction of the first human outpost in 2023.
Quick Overview
Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, and Cisco’s video conferencing service, Webex, will have a journey of their own when they hit deep space. They’re scheduled to ride aboard NASA’s Orion crew capsule that will take a test flight into lunar orbit this March. The vehicles will remain there for a few weeks before landing back in Earth’s atmosphere. It’ll be called Artemis-I. It will provide data that can help prepare astronauts for longer missions in deep space.
What is NASA’s Artemis program?
The Artemis program is a lunar exploration initiative. The goal of Artemis is to place humans back on the moon by 2024, in order to prepare for eventual missions to Mars. The spacecraft will be named after Apollo’s twin sister, Artemis. To keep costs down and speed up development, government has proposed drawing heavily from existing private-sector technology available today. For example, both Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant technology and Cisco’s WebEx collaboration platform will play important roles in helping future astronauts make their way across our vast solar system. Understood that part? Good; now let’s take a deeper dive into how two such unlikely allies will help us one day reach new frontiers from Earth or beyond it…
How will be Amazon’s Alexa And Cisco’s Webex Helping Nasa?
Three months from now, when astronauts will be touching down on Moon’s surface, amazonalexa and ciscowebex may not be there with them. But a piece of them will have travelled more than 384,000km in airless expanse between Earth and Moon. The tech giants’ artificial intelligence-powered assistants (Alexa for Amazon and Webex for Cisco) will help scientists explore lunar dust brought back to Earth by Apollo 11 mission 45 years ago. Scientists want to know what happened to that dust after being exposed to harsh environments of space. They also want to see if it retains any record of rocks that once clumped together 4.5 billion years ago to create our planet. How do you preserve a rock? It turns out, if you expose rocks in deep space as part of an asteroid belt or comet ring then they get bombarded by high energy particles. That bombardment lasts only millionths of seconds but is enough to leave microscopic traces behind.
What is Orion Crew Capsule?
The capsule will be capable of carrying astronauts back and forth from Earth to other areas in our solar system, such as Mars or an asteroid. Orion is different from SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which only takes astronauts up into low-Earth orbit (up to 1,200 miles above ground). It would make it one of the earliest destinations for people going into deep space, besides low-Earth orbit. Getting farther away from Earth also means it will take longer for communications signals between spacecraft and ground stations—sometimes hours instead of minutes.
