Images of first craters on mars discovered by AI

NASA has unveiled images of the first-ever craters discovered by AI on Mars. The system spotted them by scanning NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched in 2005 to study the presence of water on the red planet.

The cluster that AI detected was created by several pieces of a single meteor, which got shattered into pieces while flying through the Martian sky at some point between March 2010 and May 2012. The fragments landed in a region called Noctis Fossae, a long, narrow, shallow depression on Mars. They left behind a series of craters spanning about 100 feet of the planet's surface. The largest of the craters was about 13 feet wide.

Scientists would search for these craters by laboriously scanning through images captured by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Context Camera with their own eyes. The system takes low-resolution pictures of the planet covering hundreds of miles at a time, and it takes a researcher around 40 minutes to scan a single image.

To overcome, Scientists and AI researchers at NASA teamed up to develop a tool called automated fresh impact crater classifier. They trained the classifier by feeding 6,830 Context Camera images. This dataset contained a range of previously confirmed craters, as well as pictures with no fresh impacts to show the AI what not to look for.

Finally, the team used NASA's HiRISE camera, to confirm that they had spotted was indeed a cluster of craters. The team believes that the tool could paint a fuller picture of meteor impacts on Mars, which could contain geological clues about life on the planet.