How can impact craters be detected on Mars?
The symposium was organized in cooperation with the Commission for Astronomy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and presented research results of the Mars-DL project by JOANNEUM RESEARCH, VRVis, Natural History Museum Vienna, SLR Engineering and University of Vienna. The Mars-DL project is co-funded under the Austrian Space Programme ASAP, which is financed by the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) and supervised by the Research Promotion Agency FFG (FFG project number 873683).
Renowned speakers and experts from the fields of geoscience and astronomy, who were looking for the new ways to use artificial intelligence for the detection of impact rocks on rover imagery, gave an overview of project activities and discussed the perspectives of using data from past missions to investigate undiscovered phenomena.
Gerhard Paar, head of the Space Robotics and Instruments Team at the research group Machine Vision Applications of the institute DIGITAL, gave one of the talks. His presentation "The Mars-DL project - an overview. With introduction: The eyes of the Mars rovers - digital cameras and the image of the surface of the planet, which they provide us" gave an overview of the sensors and techniques used to analyze, use and present the image data recorded by the cameras on board of the rovers. Using impressive images from the surface of Mars, the expert demonstrated how machine vision has changed our knowledge of the solar system. During his presentation, the project leader explained that artificial intelligence is supposed to explore the objects and regions on planets where no one has gone before.
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Gerhard Paar is the head of the Space Robotics and Instruments team at the research group Machine Vision Applications of the institute DIGITAL. He is co-investigator for PanCam and CLUPI of the ESA/ROSCOSMOS Exo-Mars 2022 (Rosalind Franklin) mission, as well as for Mastcam-Z of the NASA Mars-2020 (Perseverance) rover mission. He is on the panel of the European Space Science Committee (ESSC) of the European Science Fund (ESF) and has led 4 EU projects and dozens of national and international research and development projects in space-related and industrial environments.