NASA is developing its own ChatGPT-style interface that could allow astronauts to talk to their spacecraft and mission controllers to converse with artificial intelligence-powered robots exploring distant planets and moons, Guardian reported on Saturday. 

NASA is currently arranging to deploy AI on Lunar Getaway, a planned extraterrestrial space station that is part of the Artemis programme. The new system will allow the astronauts and mission control to talk to spacecraft in a natural language interface, saving the hassle of going through technical manuals for relevant information. 

Dr Larissa Suzuki, a visiting researcher at Nasa said “The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they [are] also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system and beyond.” Suzuki outlined an interplanetary communications network with inbuilt AI to detect, and possibly fix, glitches and inefficiencies as they occur. 

“It then alerts mission operators that there is a likelihood that package transmissions from space vehicle X will be lost or will fail delivery,” she said. 

“We cannot send an engineer up in space whenever a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow.” 

Suzuki further added that she is also investigating how to deploy machine learning in space, where it is not possible to run vast amounts of data through supercomputers. 

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