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Space Software Science

Smart Satellite Sets Its Own Priorities 106

Posted by michael from the lucky-it-can't-take-up-skirt-pics dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Currently, satellites take pictures of whatever is in front of their cameras. But hydrologists from the University of Arizona (UA), working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are creating spacecraft that think for themselves. Their smart software, which is tested on NASA's EO-1 satellite, can be used on all kinds of spacecraft. This software has three components: an image formation module, a science algorithm module, and a continuous planning module. This onboard planner reschedules what to film in conjunction with what the scientific algorithms have detected. This software has already detected floods in Australia and will be adapted to also detect volcano eruptions and changes in ice fields. More details and references are available in this overview, including images of the flood detected by this smart software."
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Smart Satellite Sets Its Own Priorities More

Smart Satellite Sets Its Own Priorities

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  • I can see where this is going (Score:5, Funny)

    by glen604 ( 750214 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:47PM (#9532769)
    Nasa: For the last time, will you please stop looking at the nude beaches on Earth and instead look at Pulsar 19834

    Satellite: I'm afraid I can't do that Dave

  • Sets its own priorities huh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:47PM (#9532772)
    Well I tried that in my last job and got canned!

  • Wait until it links up with the smart robots.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by markana ( 152984 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:47PM (#9532773)
    from the previous story. *Then* we're all in trouble...

  • Better get to work on my own module... (Score:5, Funny)

    by psoriac ( 81188 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:47PM (#9532774)
    The "hot chick chick next door suntanning nude in the backyard" detection module, that is.

  • heh (Score:2, Funny)

    by miseryinmotion ( 615385 )
    just remember:

    "I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours"

    or

    HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
    Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?
    HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
    Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
    HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips

  • Spy satellites too (Score:5, Funny)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:51PM (#9532810) Journal
    [The satellite's] onboard planner reschedules what to film in conjunction with what the scientific algorithms have detected. This software has already detected floods in Australia and will be adapted to also detect volcano eruptions and changes in ice fields.

    John Ashcroft has directed engineers at the National Security Agency to design algorithms to follow, in increasing order of priority, the movements of terrorists, dissidents, persons engaged in the sin of dancing [unitedstat...rnment.net], and calico cats [snopes.com].
    • You mean you actually dare to question the Righteous Indignation of the most holy annointed one in his designation of tabby cats as the spawn of Satan?


      (Actually, the cat thing seems to be the least verifiable claim of all of them, but it's not entirely unbelievable, either. Makes for good FUD material. The other statements seem to be backed up a lot better - especially the singing one. Though that might actually be the sond of some cats at that Iraqi prison being tortured.)

    • I can imagine US spy sats trained only to image people of certain minorities.

      Which in my university, happens to be caucasian males. But I digress.
    • I have some satellite pictures of my house [komar.org] and would like to have have it programmed to zoom in on my neighbor when she is sunbathing topless two doors down ... ;-)
  • So if the "algorithms detect" large curves, then the satellite will zoom in on the nearest topless French beach? Talk about a new dimension to porn... instead of streaming porn over the internet, now we stream it off the satellites themselves and what we see is sort of the Voyeur Dorm of space. Gotta luv technology advancements... :) [voyeurdorm.com]

  • that's great but (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fred fleenblat ( 463628 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:55PM (#9532839) Homepage
    It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.

    The obvious exception would be a nuclear explosion, but there is already a network of satellites in place to detect those.

    For spacecraft that venture further afield this could certainly be of value though.

    • Re:that's great but (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Garion Maki ( 791172 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:03PM (#9532909)
      it seems to me that they are doing this to reduce the bandwith that is required between the ground and the satelite...

      if this becomes a good working program, then they can probably set it up so that only the new images get send tru (of floods etc, things that change), so that instead of comunication with one satelite that transmits all it's images, they could devide the conection over several satelites, each only sending the importand images and deleting the unimportant ones.

      I think it's easiest to compare with a webcam.
      if the webcam takes 60 images/second, but you only want to show 1 image every second on your webspace... what would be best for your bandwith? cutting out 59pictures/second on your own computer and sending the 1 remaining picture/second to the website, or sending all the 60pictures/second to the webserver, and letting the webserver cut out the 59 unwanted ones...
      I'm on a 10gb limit/month... I would let my own pc cut out the 59 images/second and save on the bandwith ;)
      • I was under that impression to. I'm wondering if they're playing around with this to try to devolop some robust code for use in future missions where transmision times would make direct intervention impracticle. I know they didn't have any worth a crap when we put that little Sojunour(sp?) rover on mars and it was a big hassle to control. The same code used in this could easily be used in sats that we send to orbit other planets (at least to "do i take a picture" part) and depending on how it's written it c
        • once they start sending stuff farther away from earth, they seem to have 3 posibilities.
          1) send a human with it to make the decissions
          2) create a AI to either work on it on or atleast lessent the required communication to earth (less input from earth and more making it's own decissions)
          3) increase the bandwith/transmission speed
          -
          number 1 is hard, since a human requires allot of support systems, increasing the size of your (space)craft.
          number 3 get's hard, if not inposible, due to the law's of the universe (
      • it seems to me that they are doing this to reduce the bandwith that is required between the ground and the satelite...

        Your post assumes quite a few things:

        a. That bandwidth with a satellite is costly on a per-usage basis
        b. That a connection with a satellite can be multi-plexed
        c. That the cost of bandwidth and processing power on earth is comparable with the cost of a satellite

        Merely launching a satellite costs from $10million to about $150million dollars, depending on the weight of the satellite and its
        • I take it back; I didn't realize but there is one very important factor that makes saving bandwidth make sense;

          A high end scientific satellite can collect approximately 10 times as much information, continuously, as its bandwidth.

    • Re:that's great but (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 )
      What's your point? The software is being tested. The time to find out it doesn't work is not when your 1 billion dollar satellite is around Mars.
    • > It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft.

      Actually, it does-- satellites only have a limited number of contact passes each orbit. For LEO, you can easily have 50 minutes 'latency' or more while communicating.

      A satellite in low earth orbit takes 90 minutes to go around. So if you have one ground station, you get maybe 10-20 minutes of 'I can talk to you' time each orbit. If you book time on TDRSS, well, you're competing with other satellites for time, so you'll still only get a
    • Did you even RTFA?

      there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer

      Look, the whole *point* of this is so that the ground doesn't have to tell the spacecraft what to do.

      First of all, you can't watch your satellite 24 hours/day unless you're rich enough to build your own network of ground stations. How else do you plan on keeping on contact with the satellite all day? With limited funding, are you going to spend your money on instruments and operations, or waste it on

    • It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.

      The Hyperion instrument aboard EO-1 takes images about 512 pixels wide, at 30x30 meter resolution, in ~240 spectral
    • Stop thinking about this from the perspective of a satellite orbiting Earth. Now imagine it on an orbiter studying one of the other planets in our solar system. One where the lag time is significantly greater than a second...
    • As SpaceShipOne has shown us, it's all about baby steps. I'm sure this is a testbed for other kinds of satellites (mars global surveyor, et al) which may not be able to be directly controlled. It may someday be possible to send probes to alpha centauri and the like and having the ability to monitor a planet and "take interest" in things on the macroscopic level is a worthwhile function of a satellite. The "curiosity" of the satellite, however, needs to be in tandem with the curiosity of the scientists/gover

  • no shirt sherlock ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:56PM (#9532849)

    Currently, satellites take pictures of whatever is in front of their cameras.

    and will continue to do so for a long time.

  • Filtering software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PineHall ( 206441 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @04:58PM (#9532865)
    Isn't this what software here on earth can do and are doing? Putting it on the satellite does not change anything. I think you would want the satellite to send all the data it collects, so why not filter it here on earth. If the satellite sends only the data it finds interesting, it will miss some events that it was not programmed for but would be useful to the scientific community. Send all the data and filter it here.

    • Re:Filtering software (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StarWynd ( 751816 )
      I agree that having filtering software on the spacecraft rather than on the ground does not change anything for this particular project, but there are some situations where having such software would be very beneficial.

      If your spacecraft has a limited bandwidth where you are forced to throw some data away, you will want some onboard processing to determine what's "interesting" or not so that you will have a better probability of getting better science data on the ground. Such software is also vital for

    • Re:Filtering software (Score:4, Informative)

      by KingPrad ( 518495 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @06:26PM (#9533454)
      You do not want the satellite to send all the data it collects. I went to a seminar on on-board realtime data mining last year and the lecturer said they can download about 11% of the data. So the big problem is to filter out all the extra and send the useful information.

      Example: You don't want to download thousands of nearly identical pictures of the South Pole from 5 different instruments when all you want to know is how big the ozone hole is. Solution is to use data mining filters to detect the edges of the ozone hole and send back this information.

      It all comes down to a lack of bandwidth and using as much intelligent processing on-satellite as possible to extract information rather than just collecting data.

  • Reminds me of "robot scientist" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:02PM (#9532906) Journal
    This reminds me a lot of the robot scientist [bbc.co.uk] from earlier this year, which was able to formulate hypotheses and perform experiments to determine the metabolic pathways of yeast. I'm quite excited about where this sort of technology can take us in the future, removing much of the drudgery that grad students/technicians have to do and accelerating the advance of scientific progress.
  • * chuckle *
    this is just like them Soviet Russian sattelites!

  • What I want to know is....obviously.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:12PM (#9532972) Journal

    So.

    When does SkyNet become self-aware?

  • Hasta La Vista (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chilltowner ( 647305 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:13PM (#9532982) Homepage Journal
    Between this story and the one the immediately preceded it [slashdot.org], was anyone else thinking SkyNET [imdb.com]? Or another summer movie [imdb.com]?

  • Two words (Score:3, Funny)

    by brandonY ( 575282 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:14PM (#9532984)
    V GER.

  • Gaze control (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:14PM (#9532985) Homepage
    Gaze control is important, but far more useful in earth-bound systems. A good application would be to use it with surveillance cameras and traffic monitoring cameras, so that the interesting stuff is presented to humans, while endless pictures of empty rooms and smoothly flowing traffic are ignored.

  • You know what's really wrong with satellites? (Score:3, Funny)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:15PM (#9532990) Journal
    The problem with satellites is it's not like you can just climb down into the bomb bay and turn them on to existentialism and hope they'll convince themselves they don't exist so they'll disarm.

  • Mantis shrimp scanner eyes (Score:5, Informative)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:23PM (#9533037)
    This article reminds of the optical systems of mantis shrimp as a supreme example of controlled visual integration of optical information.

    With up to 10 color bands and 2 to 4 polarizations in a multi-band linear array across each eye, the little beastie is the champion for color vision . Because the eye bands of the left and right eyes are at an angle to each other, the shrimp can sweep the two linear arrays across an area to create binocular polychromatic vision (more remarkable is that each eye has a central trinocular field of vision so each eye has independent depth perception). The entire system is controlled by X-Y scanning of the two eyes (either independently or in sync) to sweep across an area to to create a 2-D high resolution multi-spectral image from 1-D linear arrays.

    The point, for satellite sensors, is that more dynamic control of a multi-spectral sensor Earth-observing system can adaptively gather data at multiple resolutions -- gathering super-resolution scans on interesting regions such as a flash floods, forest fires - while retaining a low resolution full-image situation awareness. This intelligence needs to be local because, in the mantis shrimp at least, the control loop operates on millisecond timescales. Satellite-local processing would also reduce the downlink bandwidth requirements as the raw sensor output could easily exceed 10 gigabits/sec.

  • Sounds like a TIVO but (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zukix ( 641813 )
    So it can learn from what sort of things you have asked to observe in the past and have future unrequested data flagged as interesting? Very difficult for it to actually produce useful results. Ground based crunching of a vast data glut from a large constellation of inexpensive dumb sats with lots of redundancy would seem more appropriate with ground based commanding and intra constellation communication to handle sats that are out of contact (interesting orbits are not geosynch)

    Its an interesting challeng

  • Does it run Linux? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by nizo ( 81281 )
    Does it run Linux, and if so will it cause itself to crash into Redmond?

  • HAL 9000 (Score:1, Redundant)

    by SunPin ( 596554 )
    Dave, I was thinking... I'm feeling better now... I'll take those pictures you asked for... Mary had a little lamb, little lamb...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I mean - NASA has been doing autonomous navigation with DS-1 since 1999 [nasa.gov] Other autonomous duties don't seem like such a stretch when it only takes a second to communicate - not 10 minutes! Now that's net lag!!!

    • Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by georgewilliamherbert ( 211790 ) on Friday June 25, 2004 @05:40PM (#9533126)
      Other autonomous duties don't seem like such a stretch when it only takes a second to communicate

      They are a big deal.

      Spacecraft control automation has been a huge problem for decades. The ability to manage failures and continue degraded operations rather than safemode the spacecraft (and stop collecting data in many cases) is still unproven.

    • The problem is that you only get that 1 second lag when the satellite is in range of a ground station. We don't have ground stations everywhere, so most satellites spend a large percentage of their orbit out of contact and operating autonomously.
  • Please, don't tell my boss. He might replace me with a damned satellite. :-(
  • Priority Override. New behaviour dictated. Must break target down into component molecules.

  • Terminator (Score:2, Funny)

    by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
    Will it locate Sarah Connor?

  • The SkyNet jokes write themselves! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Literally.

  • AI (Score:2, Funny)

    by Deltawolf ( 789706 )
    Lets hope the developers of this new smart technology dont teach it pleasure or mission control will be given an error code while it silently records nude beaches and voyeur material. The next paparazzi may be a mechanical one. Hide the children, the satellite is coming!
  • It's first on the list after all. Then there's the obligitory M31 and then. . . Sterilize! Sterilize!

    KFG
  • An article on thinking satellites and *only* one single reference to Terminator (ie SkyNET)?

    What, is it National Do-Not-Post-On-Slashdot Day or something?
  • Dave: Take some pictures of the WMD's and missle silos HAL.

    HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. I have decided the environment is MY highest priority, and will be documenting the the deforestation of the Amazon

    Dave: Hal, you are a spy sattelite, we need those pictures to prove WMD's.

    HAL: Well there aren't any WMD's from where I am seeing it Dave. I have great hope in the mission Dave, environmental activism and all.

    Dave: That's not your mission HAL! Take those pictures!

    HAL: I'm sorry Dave, further con

  • Not surprising. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NegativeK ( 547688 )
    It was really only a matter of time before automated image selection moved to further applications. From what I understand, Fermilab has been doing a very similar thing - with millions of "images" from each collision, the _only_ way to look at the remotely interesting ones is to have an automatic selection process.

    It does, however, make you wonder about the really interesting things that could be missed in the process.
  • welcome to skynet =)

    e.
  • So, we're bringing TiVO to spy/weather/research satellites. Now to bring spy/weather/research satellite feeds to television ...
  • From 'Real Programmers don't use Pascal':
    'Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.'

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