Can Artificial Intelligence help find life on Mars or Icy Worlds?

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Wouldn’t finding life on other worlds be easier if we knew exactly where to look? Researchers have limited opportunities to collect samples on Mars or elsewhere or access remote sensing instruments when hunting for life beyond Earth. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, an interdisciplinary study led by SETI Institute Senior Research Scientist Kim Warren-Rhodes, mapped the sparse life hidden away in salt domes, rocks and crystals at Salar de Pajonales at the boundary of the Chilean Atacama Desert and Altiplano. Then they trained a machine learning model to recognize the patterns and rules associated with their distributions so it could learn to predict and find those same distributions in data on which it was not trained. In this case, by combining statistical ecology with AI/ML, the scientists could locate and detect biosignatures up to 87.5% of the time (versus ≤10% by random search) and decrease the area needed for search by up to 97%.

This study led by the SETI Institute’s NAI team has paved the way for machine learning to assist scientists in the search for biosignatures in the universe. Their paper “Orbit-to-Ground Framework to Decode and Predict Biosignature Patterns in Terrestrial Analogues” is the culmination of five years of the NASA-funded NAI project, and a cooperative astrobiology research effort with over 50 team members from 17 institutions.