Space infrastructure startup Lunar Outpost has announced a collaboration with Nvidia on deploying lunar Edge computing as part of the latter’s Moon Missions.
Lunar Outpost will power onboard data processing, lunar mapping, and communications across a number of Lunar missions using Nvidia's Edge-focused Jetson platform and Nvidia CUDA-X libraries.
– Lunar Outpost
“Lunar missions require intelligent systems that can process data and make decisions in real time,” Chen Su, head of Edge AI product marketing at Nvidia, said in a statement. “Lunar Outpost is using Nvidia Jetson and CUDA-X libraries to give its rovers the onboard AI computing needed for terrain mapping, autonomous navigation, mission data processing and scientific discovery.”
Both companies state automation is crucial to space exploration technologies, particularly those further from Earth and exposed to extreme conditions. Traditionally, machines on the Moon and Mars have tended to wait for signals to move across the solar system before executing man-made courses of action, taking advantage of slow-and-steady methods. Beyond the inner planets, the delays of this strategy expand and become untenable in the case of probes outside the Solar System.
