Launched from Cape Canaveral on board the Atlas V-541 November 26, 2011, The Curiosity Mars rover landed on the surface of Mars at 10:32 p.m. PDT at Aug. 5, 2012. The Curiosity Mars rover has been travailing on the red planet using its complex instruments to collect data ever since and could use your help to speed up the mission. NASA has announced a new online tool for helping teach the Curiosity Mars rover to automatically read the landscape. Called SPOC (Soil Property and Object Classification) the Curiosity Mars rover takes pictures of the Red Planet and sends them to Earth for analysis. Using the online tool AI4Mars, users can help train a deep learning AI algorithms by highlighting interesting attributes of the Mars landscape. Once SPOC is fully trained, it will be able to automatically distinguish between different soils, rocks, and dangerous sand dunes, and making it easier to plan Curiosity’s next moves.
The Curiosity Mars rover is equipped with many science instruments such as; RAD (Radiation Assessment Detector), DAN (Dynamic Albedo Of Neutrons), SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and the CSA / ASC contribution of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument, to name a few.
