Japan Succeeds in Identifying Asteroid Rocks Rapidly Using AI
Tokyo, April 7 (Jiji Press)--A University of Tokyo team Monday said that by using artificial intelligence technology, it succeeded in rapidly identifying from photographs the size, location and shape of some 200,000 rocks on two asteroids.
The photos of Ryugu were taken by Japan's Hayabusa2 unmanned asteroid probe, while those of Bennu were taken by the U.S. probe Osiris-Rex. The findings were published Monday in the British journal Scientific Reports.
The team, including university project researcher Yuta Shimizu and professor Hideaki Miyamoto, hopes to apply its findings not only to planetary science but also the fields of civil engineering and disaster prevention on Earth.
In its research, the team fed an AI system information on some 70,000 rocks on Earth and other celestial bodies and developed an automatic rock identification tool.
After being fed some 10,000 high-resolution photos of Ryugu and Bennu, the tool identified some 20,000 rocks at least 1 meter in size on the surface of Ryugu and around 180,000 such rocks on Bennu.
(2025/04/07-19:07)
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