These new articles about NASA and Amazon are quite interesting.


https://voicebot.ai/2022/01/05/nasa-will-take-alexa-to-space-and-maybe-the-moon/

NASA Will Take Alexa to Space and Maybe the Moon

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ

on January 5, 2022 at 12:00 pm

NASA is incorporating Alexa in the upcoming Artemis missions that will eventually send humans back to the Moon. Alexa will be part of the Callisto hardware engineered by Lockheed Martin as a space-worthy smart display.

As seen in the video above, the upcoming Artemis I mission will carry Alexa as part of Callisto. NASA worked with Amazon, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin engineers to design and build Callisto. Amazon’s local voice control technology and Alexa software are set into Lockheed’s custom body to ensure it can survive the intense physical stress of launch and radiation exposure in space. Amazon had to create new audio processing software so that Alexa could hear and understand people through the constant engine and other noise of a spacecraft. If successful, Alexa should be able to converse with astronauts to provide information from local and Earth-bound databases and carry out specific tasks like adjusting lights or compiling and sending data back to Earth more efficiently than is currently feasible.

“The Star Trek computer was part of our original inspiration for Alexa, so it’s exciting and humbling to see our vision for ambient intelligence come to life on board Orion,” Alexa Everywhere vice president Aaron Rubenson said. “

We’re proud to be working with Lockheed Martin to push the limits of voice technology and AI,

and we hope Alexa’s role in the mission helps inspire future scientists, astronauts, and engineers who will define this next era of space exploration.”

SPACE AT HOME

The Artemis I is uncrewed but will serve to test many of the technologies that NASA plans to use for future, crewed missions on the Orion spacecraft. Artemis will culminate, though not conclude, with crewed missions to the Moon by astronauts, including the first women and people of color sent to the Moon. To test Callisto on an uncrewed mission, Amazon and its partners built a virtual crew experience at NASA’s Johnson Space Center Mission Control Center in Houston. Engineers will access Callisto remotely, simulate interactions, and gather audio and video footage from the mission.

As part of the new program, Amazon is adding access to public data from the spacecraft to Alexa-enabled devices, including video of the launch and virtual crew interactions. The company has also launched Alexa for Astronauts as part of the Amazon Future Engineer program offering students virtual tours of the Johnson Space Center and giving teachers materials for teaching about computer science and Artemis I. The new features will roll out as they are produced and can be accessed by asking, “Alexa, take me to the Moon.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/05/alexa-space-moon-nasa-lockheed-martin-cisco/

‘Alexa, take me to the moon’

Amazon and Cisco are working with Lockheed Martin to outfit NASA’s Orion spacecraft with AI and videoconferencing.

Today, it might be used in more mundane ways, such as checking the weather and sports scores, and helping with minor trivia queries: “Alexa, how many cups in a quart?” But the original inspiration for Amazon’s ubiquitous all-hearing Internet sage was the talking computer on the Starship Enterprise, which helped Captain Kirk navigate the cosmos on “Star Trek.”

Now, Alexa may soon be going to space in reality.

Lockheed Martin, which is building theOrion spacecraft that NASAhopes will fly astronauts to the moon within a couple of years, is partnering with Amazon to put an Alexa on the capsule.

The device would give astronauts

real-time information on telemetry, the health of the spacecraft and its speed. And, yes, they might utter something along the lines of: “Alexa, how far to the moon?”

NASA says moon landing would now come in 2025

Astronauts would be able to get information about their water supply or battery levels, even change the temperature or color of the lights in the crew module, the companies said. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

It would be possible “for astronauts to ask for near real-time data about the spacecraft, the mission, the subsystems,” Aaron Rubenson, Amazon’s vice president for Alexa, said in a briefing. “What speed are we going on? More importantly, from the crew perspective: What’s the time to the next [engine] burn? What’s that alarm that just went off? Remind me what that is.”

In addition to Alexa,the Orion spacecraftwill be outfitted with screens that display Webex by Cisco, the communications platform that, like Zoom, allows users to see each other and share critical information.

Taken together, the package, known as Callisto, would help translate different languages so astronauts from all over the world could communicate. It would also help controllers on the ground share information over a screen, the way company offices communicate remotely.

The system would “make sure that the distance does not become a barrier to how people can collaborate when there's something that goes wrong,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president at Cisco.

The platform would alsohelp in “overcoming isolation”by allowing astronauts to “stay and feel connected to their home and to their family members and their friends,” Patel said. “And we just want to make sure that this becomes a seamless kind of assumed capability that’s there, even in space, where people can see and talk to each other at any point in time and interact and collaborate with each other.”

The onboard space Alexa would not be connected to the Internet but instead connect directly to Orion’s computer and its own onboard cloud, which would allow it to monitor the health of the spacecraft. Still, it could send queries back to Earth and connect with the cloud to retrieve all sorts of information, such as news, that would help astronauts to feel less lonely. There would be a lag in those queries since data would have to travel from the spacecraft to Earth and then from Earth to the spacecraft.

2021 was a big year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger.

The system is slated to launch on NASA’s Artemis I mission, now scheduled for March at the earliest, that would send the Orion spacecraft intoorbit around the moon. While that flight would not have astronauts onboard, engineers would test Callisto by monitoring it on the ground as well as by keeping tabs on it with cameras inside the spacecraft.

“This is all about testing it on this flight, seeing if it’s valuable,” said Rob Chambers, Lockheed Martin’s director of civil space strategy. “And then we can assess how it can be used as we move forward, not just on Orion, but in habitats, rovers, any number of other applications that we’re actively looking at.”