Project Details
The Challenge | Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Sample!
You are the astronaut/robotic mission lead tasked with bringing valuable specimens from the Moon back to Earth for further study. How will you evaluate lunar samples quickly and effectively before or while still on the mission? How will you differentiate samples of potential scientific value from less interesting material?
Sonny: We'll ROCK you, on the Moon!
Sonny is a deep learning-rover system for lunar rock identification.
The Sonny's aim is to detect and recognize different types of rock on lunar surface, in order to save astronauts time.
Initially, the deep neural network needs to be trained to recognize rocks using what we have here on Earth, like earth rocks and samples returned back by Apollo mission astronauts.
When the Sonny's "brain" is ready, the rover itself can be built.
When the rover is ready, astronauts can bring Sonny with them in a based-lunar mission and helping them with preliminary surface recognition.
Moon rocks NASA archive:
- https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/surface/apolloCollectionsPartI.pdf
- https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/surface/apolloCollectionsPartII.pdf
- https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/lsc/14053.pdf
- https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/catalogs/other/jsc23454toolcatalog.pdf
Curiosity hardware:
- https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/mahli/
- https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/apxs/
GIthub code: