SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
NASA will be hosting a somewhat unusual press conference on Thursday (NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14) to announce the latest find from its planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler has found many hundreds of planets beyond our solar system over the years, but this week's announcement will be different because Google will be sharing in the science spotlight.
"The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google," reads a release from the space agency, adding that the breakthrough "demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data."
Exactly what has been discovered won't be revealed until Thursday, but with Kepler there's always a good chance that some new distant planets will be part of the reveal. Expect to hear something about a new era of planet-hunting assisted by artificial intelligence: That would be my guess for Thursday. We'll just have to wait and see if Google's A.I. is also helping to detect signs of alien life on the numerous worlds beyond our solar system as well.
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-nasa-kepler-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-planets/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jdccdevel on Wednesday December 13 2017, @09:28PM (1 child)
I'm hoping someone figured out how to use the Kepler data to discover lots of new Asteroid and Kuniper belt objects (i.e, things in our solar system) or some other novel use of the Kepler data it wasn't intended for.
That would be cool, and it'd be interesting to learn what they came up with.
On the other hand, if they're just announcing a bunch of new exo-planets... That's interesting, but that's what the Kepler data is for. That AI did the looking is kind of unremarkable for me.... from my understanding the criteria for detecting a exo-planet in that data are quite well established and understood by now.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday December 13 2017, @09:39PM
It can be done:
https://phys.org/news/2016-10-kepler-caught-hundreds-asteroids.html [phys.org]
I think it will be about exoplanets, but we'll see.
The real Kuiper Belt MVP [usra.edu] is likely to be LSST [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]