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In the second half of 2003 ESA delivered a roadmap, in the framework of the Aurora programme, to bring humans to
explore Mars within the next few decades. The plan included the successful implementation of several flagstone missions as a step to reach this final ambitious goal. A few months later, with the vision delivered by the United States president G.W. Bush, the National Space Administration (NASA) also started to draft plans for the manned exploration of Mars. Their vision included the establishment of a human base on the Moon among several other advanced preparing steps.The return of humans to the Moon and a future manned mission to Mars seem therefore to be likely achievements we will witness in the next few decades. At the same time, even more ambitious plans and missions are being conceived by farsighted researchers who dream about the exploration and colonization of even further planets. In the second half of 2003 ESA delivered a roadmap, in the framework of the Aurora programme, to bring humans to
explore Mars within the next few decades. The plan included the successful implementation of several flagstone missions as a step to reach this final ambitious goal. A few months later, with the vision delivered by the United States president G.W. Bush, the National Space Administration (NASA) also started to draft plans for the manned exploration of Mars. Their vision included the establishment of a human base on the Moon among several other advanced preparing steps.The return of humans to the Moon and a future manned mission to Mars seem therefore to be likely achievements we will witness in the next few decades. At the same time, even more ambitious plans and missions are being conceived by farsighted researchers who dream about the exploration and colonization of even further planets.
In the framework of these more or less concrete future scenarios, the consolidation of artificial intelligence methods in space engineering is certainly an enabling factor. The reader can think of a future mission to Mars. This will probably be constituted by a large number of heterogeneous space agents (intended as satellites, humans, robots, modules, sensors and so on). In such a scenario, the communication round-trip delay time, depending on the relative position of Mars to the Earth, would range from 6.5 minutes to 44 minutes approximately. Besides, communication with the Earth would not be possible at all during 14 days every Mars synodic period (approximately 2.1 years). Clearly, for such a mission to happen, the single space agents must be able to take autonomous decisions, to interact harmoniously among each other and to be able to reason on their own health status as to plan properly their actions. Unfortunately, if we take a look at the current state of the art of artificial intelligence applications in space engineering, we can identify several open issues and show stoppers. We are surely far from the desirable situation in which these methods can be considered as an off-the-shelf tool available to space engineers.
The ACT has identified open research questions
and challenges in this field and is involved in a number of research activities.
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