NASA Welcomes You To Explore Mars Aboard Curiosity Rover In New Online Tool

NASA has launched a new program that allows space enthusiasts to navigate its Curiosity rover across Mars.

Dubbed AI4Mars, the program encourages you to take part in its mission on learning more about the Red Planet. Though it doesn’t allow you to directly steer the rover, users can label different features of the terrain, such as rocks, sand and soil, that the robot comes across and determine if it should avoid or gravitate towards them. The descriptors will then be pooled into a database that gives the rover a rough idea of what it is seeing.

The program offers space lovers the opportunity to participate in NASA’s Curiosity explorations by helping the team better grasp which kinds of terrains the rover is working with.

In a statement, NASA explained, “You’ll be using your superior cognitive and artistic abilities to label images from the Curiosity Rover, collectively creating the first open-source navigation-classification dataset of the Red Planet. It will be used – like the cityscapes dataset – by teams to train rovers to understand Martian environments, laying the way for future missions to unlock the secrets of our nearest neighbor!”