Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Imagine for a second that you are well millions of
Speaker 2: miles away from Earth right just hurtling through the absolute,
Speaker 2: pitch black, freezing void of deep space. Everything is going
Speaker 2: perfectly according to plan, and then suddenly something completely.
Speaker 3: Unexpected happens always does.
Speaker 2: Exactly, like maybe a piece of debris strikes the hull,
Speaker 2: or an unprecedented solar flare washes over the ship, or
Speaker 2: I don't know, a vital thruster just suddenly misfires.
Speaker 3: Oh that's bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's bad. Alarms are going off. You desperately need
Speaker 2: a solution. But here is the terrifying reality. Because of
Speaker 2: the sheer, vastness of space, there is this massive communication delay.
Speaker 2: Massive Right, a distress signal sent to Earth might take
Speaker 2: say twenty minutes just to get there, and then another
Speaker 2: twenty minutes for any kind of response to actually come back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and by the time Earth even knows you're in trouble,
Speaker 3: I mean, the mission could already be totally.
Speaker 2: Lost, completely lost. The spacecraft just has to figure it
Speaker 2: out entirely on its own.
Speaker 3: Basically the ultimate locked room puzzle. But you know, the
Speaker 3: room is traveling at thousands of miles an hour through
Speaker 3: the most hostile environment imagined. Yeah, when a mission is
Speaker 3: that far out, autonomy isn't just some like futuristic luxury.
Speaker 3: It is a baseline requirement for survival. You simply cannot
Speaker 3: wait for a human sitting at a desk in a
Speaker 3: control room on Earth to just push a button, so.
Speaker 2: To figure out how we survive that scenario. Today, we
Speaker 2: are talking about a really monumental technological leap from NASA's
Speaker 2: Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We're looking at their new high performance
Speaker 2: spaceflight computing processor.
Speaker 3: Game changer, it really is.
Speaker 2: We are talking about a revolutionary AI space chip designed
Speaker 2: to let spacecraft literally think for themselves. So, okay, let's
Speaker 2: unpack this because to truly appreciate how transformative this piece
Speaker 2: of hardware is, we really need to understand the reality
Speaker 2: of how spacewhit computing currently operates, and frankly, the current
Speaker 2: state of technology up there might surprise.
Speaker 3: A lot of people, Oh absolutely, because you know, people
Speaker 3: naturally assume that since we are sending these incredibly sophisticated
Speaker 3: billion dollar machines out into the cosmos, they must be
Speaker 3: running on the absolute bleeding edge of computer processing.
Speaker 2: Right, like they've got the best tech available.
Speaker 3: Exactly. You might picture quantum computers or at least processors
Speaker 3: that are vastly superior to the laptop sitting on our desks,
Speaker 3: But the truth is entirely the opposite. Current space missions
Speaker 3: rely on computing cores that are heavily, heavily outdated by
Speaker 3: earthly standards.
Speaker 2: Which seems completely counterintuitive until you look at the extreme
Speaker 2: bottleneck of space exploration.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The environment beyond our our atmosphere is just utterly brutal
Speaker 2: on electronics. I mean, we're talking about intense electromagnetic radiation
Speaker 2: constantly bathing the solar.
Speaker 3: System, and the temperature swings, yes.
Speaker 2: Dramatic temperature fluctuation, swinging from hundreds of degrees above zero
Speaker 2: to hundreds of degrees below sometimes in a matter of
Speaker 2: like minutes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, the real enemy of modern computing
Speaker 3: out there is the high energy particles.
Speaker 2: Explain that a bit more. What kind of particles.
Speaker 3: Well, those particles are essentially the absolute bane of a
Speaker 3: spacelight engineer's existence. We're talking about cosmic rays. They're basically
Speaker 3: atomic nuclei traveling at its significant fraction of the speed
Speaker 3: of light coming from the Sun and deep space. Okay,
Speaker 3: and when one of these particles strikes a delicate modern
Speaker 3: computer chip, it does something entirely disruptive. It doesn't necessarily
Speaker 3: like leave a physical bullet hole right. Instead, it dumps
Speaker 3: a massive amount of kinetic energy directly into the silicon,
Speaker 3: and that knocks electrons completely out of their atoms.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to pause here to really visualize this.
Speaker 2: You're saying this invisible microscopic collision creates a literal burst
Speaker 2: of electrical charge inside the computer processor.
Speaker 3: Exactly that sudden burts of stray electrical charge can actually
Speaker 3: trick a delicate transistor into changing its state, so it
Speaker 3: flips a zero to a one or a one to
Speaker 3: a zero.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We call this a single event upset or a bitflip.
Speaker 3: And when that happens, the computer might suddenly calculate the
Speaker 3: wrong navigational trajectory, or an entire subsystem just gets confused.
Speaker 2: That's terrified.
Speaker 3: It is. So when a current spacecraft detects this kind
Speaker 3: of cascade error, it is programmed to immediately panic and
Speaker 3: force itself into what we call safe mode.
Speaker 2: And safe mode is basically the spacecraft curling into a
Speaker 2: defensive ball to protect itself.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Like.
Speaker 2: It temporarily shuts down all non essential systems, the science instruments,
Speaker 2: turn off, the camera's power down, and the entire multi
Speaker 2: billion dollar machine just goes completely dormant.
Speaker 3: It just floats there.
Speaker 2: Right, just floating, waiting for human engineers back on Earth
Speaker 2: to manually analyze the telemetry, find the flipped bit, and
Speaker 2: slowly coax the system back to life.
Speaker 3: And during that downtime, the spacecraft is effectively blind and paralyzed.
Speaker 3: So historically NASA has deliberately made a really severe trade
Speaker 3: off to avoid those constant, terrifying system crashes. They use older,
Speaker 3: incredibly durable chips.
Speaker 2: Older chips.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those legacy chips have physically larger transistors, and because
Speaker 3: they are larger, it requires significantly more energy to flip
Speaker 3: their state from a zero to a one, so they
Speaker 3: are highly resistant to those cosmic ray strikes.
Speaker 2: So it sounds like we're sending these incredibly vital missions
Speaker 2: into the void running on the equivalent of like a
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties brick phone.
Speaker 3: Basically, yeah, and we use.
Speaker 2: Them just because we know the screen won't crack, even
Speaker 2: though the mission really demands a modern smartphone.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect analogy, and that trade off has been
Speaker 3: completely necessary. I mean, a cutting edge, ridiculously fast modern
Speaker 3: computer is utterly useless if a single solar flare fries
Speaker 3: its microscopic circuits on day two of a ten year emission.
Speaker 2: That's fair.
Speaker 3: Surviving the environment is the non negotiable baseline. Everything else,
Speaker 3: processing speed, artificial intelligence, complex data analysis that has traditionally
Speaker 3: been treated as a secondary luxury.
Speaker 2: Okay, but I am trying to reason through this engineering
Speaker 2: problem here. Sure, if we need modern computing power, but
Speaker 2: the microscopic transistors are too fragile, why not just take
Speaker 2: a powerful modern chip out of a high end server,
Speaker 2: put it inside a really thick lead box to block
Speaker 2: the radiation, and just send that into space. Why do
Speaker 2: we need to invent a completely new chip from scratch, well.
Speaker 3: That immediately runs into the tyranny of the rocket equation. Wait, exactly,
Speaker 3: in spaceflight, waight is your absolute worst enemy. Every single
Speaker 3: ounce you send into orbit costs thousands of dollars in
Speaker 3: rocket fuel. A thick lead box heavy enough to stop
Speaker 3: high energy cosmic rays would be well impossibly massive for
Speaker 3: a modern deep space That makes sense. And add to that,
Speaker 3: heavy metal healing can sometimes cause secondary radiation scatter.
Speaker 2: Where what does that mean?
Speaker 3: So the cosmic ray hits the lead and it shatters,
Speaker 3: creating this sort of shotgun blast of secondary particles that
Speaker 3: still hit the computer.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, so the armor actually makes it worse in
Speaker 2: a way sometimes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you cannot just armoor a regular chip. You have
Speaker 3: to build the resilience directly into the silicon architecture itself.
Speaker 2: Which bridges us directly to NASA's game changing development program.
Speaker 2: Down at the Langley Research Center, they realized we are
Speaker 2: hitting a wall with the brick phone approach.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: If we want autonomous spacecraft or vastly faster onboard scientific analysis,
Speaker 2: we need high performance without sacrificing that baseline of survival.
Speaker 2: And the result of that effort is the high Performance
Speaker 2: Spaceflight Computing Processor, the HPSC. Yeah, and the physical form
Speaker 2: factor of this hardware is surprising. It is a system
Speaker 2: on a chip or and so small enough to fit
Speaker 2: completely in the palm of your hand.
Speaker 3: The system on a chip architecture is really vital here. Traditionally,
Speaker 3: a computer uses a large motherboard. You have your central
Speaker 3: processing unit one corner, your memory in another, and your
Speaker 3: networking interfaces.
Speaker 2: Somewhere else right spread out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and data has to physically travel across wires between
Speaker 3: those components, which takes time and energy. And so ce
Speaker 3: combines all of those essential components into a single highly
Speaker 3: integrated unit. You have your CPUs, your computational offloads, advanced networking,
Speaker 3: and memory interfaces all stacked together on one tiny piece
Speaker 3: of silicon.
Speaker 2: Wait, you mentioned computational offloads. I want to clarify that
Speaker 2: before I move on. What does an offload actually do
Speaker 2: in this context?
Speaker 3: Good question. Think of the main CPU as the head
Speaker 3: chef in a busy kitchen. If the head chef has
Speaker 3: to chop every single onion and wash every single dish,
Speaker 3: the actual complex cooking just grinds to a halt. A
Speaker 3: computational offload is like hiring specialized prep cooks. It is
Speaker 3: a dedicated piece of hardware. On the chip designed to
Speaker 3: handle one specific, highly pensive task, like what like crunching
Speaker 3: heavy math for navigation or processing images from a camera,
Speaker 3: it offloads that burden from the main CPU, allowing the
Speaker 3: entire chip to run vastly faster and more efficiently.
Speaker 2: I appreciate that clarity, but I have to push back
Speaker 2: on the novelty of this hardware for a second. Yeah,
Speaker 2: my tablet and my smartphone use and soci right now.
Speaker 2: I mean, that is how we get consumer devices to
Speaker 2: be so remarkably thin. What makes NASA's version a technological breakthrough?
Speaker 2: If I literally have an Aussie sitting in my pocket right.
Speaker 3: Now, well, the chip in your pocket operates in an
Speaker 3: incredibly cozy environment. It enjoys the luxury of Earth's magnetic
Speaker 3: field protecting it from cosmic radiation, and it just sits
Speaker 3: at a comfortable room temperature.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 3: NASA's version is radiation hardened from the ground up, utilizing
Speaker 3: completely different engineering principles.
Speaker 2: So how exactly do they harden it without using that
Speaker 2: heavy lead box we talked about earlier.
Speaker 3: One of the most fascinating mechanisms is called triple modular redundancy.
Speaker 2: Triple modular redundancy.
Speaker 3: Yes, Instead of having one microscopic circuit do a calculation,
Speaker 3: they build three identical circuits directly into the chip to
Speaker 3: do the exact same math simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Wait all three at the same time.
Speaker 3: Simultaneously, and at the end of the calculation, they essentially
Speaker 3: vote on the answer.
Speaker 2: Oh that's brilliant, right.
Speaker 3: If a cosmic ray strikes one of the circuits and
Speaker 3: flips a bit, causing it to output a wrong answer,
Speaker 3: the other two circuits will just outvote it. The chip
Speaker 3: instantly recognizes the error, ignores the glitch, and keeps functioning perfectly.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: They also use insulating layers in the silicon itself, often
Speaker 3: called silicon on insulator, to physically prevent that stray electrical
Speaker 3: charge from jumping between components and short circuiting the system.
Speaker 2: So they are essentially weaving fault tolerance into the actual
Speaker 2: logic of the machine exactly. And here is where the
Speaker 2: leap in capabilities gets really staggering. The design goal for
Speaker 2: this project was to deliver up to one hundred times
Speaker 2: the computing power of the spaceflight computers we are currently using.
Speaker 3: One hundred times is already huge, yeah, But.
Speaker 2: When they started putting the prototypes together and looking at
Speaker 2: the early data, they reported it is operating at performance
Speaker 2: levels roughly five hundred times greater than current radiation hardened chips.
Speaker 3: Of five hundredfold increase just completely alters what a spacecraft
Speaker 3: can accomplish.
Speaker 2: How do we properly visualize an increase of five hundred
Speaker 2: times Because people often use the cliche of trading a
Speaker 2: bicycle for a fighter jet, but that doesn't really capture
Speaker 2: the mechanics of data.
Speaker 3: Processing, No, it doesn't. A better way to look at
Speaker 3: it is through parallel processing. Imagine you were trying to
Speaker 3: find one specific quote hidden somewhere inside a massive library. Okay,
Speaker 3: the current space chips are like having a single librarian
Speaker 3: who has to read every single book page by page,
Speaker 3: one after the other. It is reliable, but painfully slow.
Speaker 3: This new chip is the equivalent of unleashing five hundred
Speaker 3: highly trained librarians to scan the entire library simultaneously. Tasks
Speaker 3: that use take hours can now be completed in a
Speaker 3: fraction of a second.
Speaker 2: Of course, you don't just build a five hundred librarian
Speaker 2: super chip, look at the paper specs and bolt it
Speaker 2: onto a rocket. You have to definitively prove it can
Speaker 2: survive the environment, oh absolutely, which brings us to the
Speaker 2: grueling testing phase happening right now at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Speaker 2: Laboratory JPL down in southern California.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Jim Butler is the project manager overseeing this at JPL,
Speaker 3: and his team's entire job is to literally torture this hardware.
Speaker 2: Torture is the right word.
Speaker 3: They began testing in February twenty twenty six, and they
Speaker 3: are putting these chips through an absolute ringer. I mean
Speaker 3: they are placing them in thermal vacuum chambers that simulate
Speaker 3: the freezing, airless void of space, baking them to extreme temperatures,
Speaker 3: and bombarding them with heavy radiation to see if that
Speaker 3: triple modular redundancy actually holds up.
Speaker 2: And beyond the environmental torture, they're simulating the immense computational
Speaker 2: stress of an actual emission. Let's talk about the specific
Speaker 2: high fidelity landing scenarios JPL is using, because what exactly
Speaker 2: happens computationally when a machine tries to land on another
Speaker 2: planet like Mars, Well.
Speaker 3: A planetary landing is often referred to as seven minutes
Speaker 3: of terror. Right the spacecraft is hitting the Martian atmosphere
Speaker 3: at thousands of miles an hour. In a span of
Speaker 3: just a few minutes, it has to deploy supersonic parachutes,
Speaker 3: jettison heat shields, fire retro rockets, and simultaneously use optical cameras,
Speaker 3: radar and lightar to rapidly scan the terrain below to
Speaker 3: avoid crashing into a crater or a boulder.
Speaker 2: The sheer volume of raw data flooding into the computer
Speaker 2: in those few seconds must be well astronomical.
Speaker 3: Oh it is, and if the processor lags for even
Speaker 3: a fraction of a second, the mission becomes a crater wow,
Speaker 3: which is precisely why JPL is using these specific scenarios.
Speaker 3: They are digitally throwing the entire tidal wave of simulated
Speaker 3: landing sensor data at this palm size processor, forcing it
Speaker 3: to calculate real time hazard avoidance.
Speaker 2: While they're torturing it physically too.
Speaker 3: Right, while simultaneously shaking it violently on acoustic vibration tables
Speaker 3: that mimic the destructive roar of a rocket launch. They
Speaker 3: want to see if the chip misses a single clock
Speaker 3: cycle under the most extreme physical and computational stress imaginable.
Speaker 2: So they're essentially forcing a supercomputer to run a marathon while.
Speaker 3: Locked inside a microwave.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, a microwave being shaken in a paint mixer,
Speaker 2: just to make sure it doesn't blink during a planetary landing, exactly.
Speaker 3: And the testing campaign is proving that this chip handles
Speaker 3: the load flawlessly. It is calculating precision landing adjustments entirely
Speaker 3: on its own, without relying on an earth bound supercomputer.
Speaker 2: That's incredible. And when the team at JPL initially kicked
Speaker 2: off this rigorous testing protocol, they sent an internal email
Speaker 2: to mark the occasion. The subject line was simply, Hello Universe.
Speaker 3: I love that. What's fascinating here is that phrase Hello
Speaker 3: Universe is a brilliant, subtle nod to the history of
Speaker 3: computer science.
Speaker 2: Oh like Hello World.
Speaker 3: Yes, whenever a student learns to write code, the very
Speaker 3: first program they are taught simply prints the words hello
Speaker 3: World on the t terminal screen. It is the universal
Speaker 3: sign of a system waking up. By expanding it to
Speaker 3: Hello Universe, the engineers are acknowledging the gravity of what
Speaker 3: they have built. This is the moment robust modern computing
Speaker 3: architecture finally scales to the demands of the cosmos.
Speaker 2: It is a massive engineering triumph, but NASA is not
Speaker 2: doing this in a vacuum. Back in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: JPL selected an Arizona based company, Microchip Technology, Inc. As
Speaker 2: their commercial partner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they actually co funded the research, right.
Speaker 2: They co funded the research and development work on the processor,
Speaker 2: which opens up a vital question, how exactly does this
Speaker 2: unprecedented processing power fundamentally change how we explore Well.
Speaker 3: The answer really lies in localized artificial intelligence. Until now,
Speaker 3: utilizing AI and deep space was nearly impossible because machine
Speaker 3: learning algorithms require massive amounts of rapid computation.
Speaker 2: The kind of computation that would instantly overwhelm a legacy spaceship.
Speaker 3: Exactly, with this new processor, spacecraft can finally run conference
Speaker 3: AI models locally on the fly.
Speaker 2: Which brings us full circle to the disaster scenario we
Speaker 2: discussed at the beginning of the show. You are millions
Speaker 2: of miles away, debreeze strikes the hull, and Earth is
Speaker 2: a forty minute round trip message away. With onboard AI,
Speaker 2: the spacecraft analyzes the sensor data the millisecond the impact happens,
Speaker 2: It instantly realizes a thrust is failing, calculates a new
Speaker 2: power distribution to compensate, autonomously fires secondary rockets to stabilize
Speaker 2: the spin, and keeps the mission alive, all in real time.
Speaker 3: It's amazing and beyond just disaster mitigation. Consider what this
Speaker 3: means for actual scientific discovery. Deep space probes collect staggering
Speaker 3: amounts of raw data. Oh yeah, think of a probe
Speaker 3: orbiting Jupiter looking for a specific split second ice geyser
Speaker 3: erupting on the moon Europa. Currently, a probe has to
Speaker 3: take thousands of high resolution images and slowly trickle all
Speaker 3: of that raw data back to Earth over the deep
Speaker 3: space network.
Speaker 2: And the deep space network is incredibly reliable, but it
Speaker 2: has severe bandwidth limitations. Sending gigabytes of raw photos from
Speaker 2: Jupiter is like trying to download a four K movie
Speaker 2: over a nineteen nineties dial up modem. It just takes forever,
Speaker 2: and humans on Earth have to manually sift through thousands
Speaker 2: of photos of empty space just to find the one
Speaker 2: image of the geyser.
Speaker 3: But with this powerful new processor, the onboard AI serves
Speaker 3: as an intelligent curator. It pre processes all the data
Speaker 3: right there in Jupiter's orbit. Okay, the AI looks at
Speaker 3: the thousand pictures instantly identifies the one single image that
Speaker 3: captures the anomaly, discards the useless data, and only transmits
Speaker 3: that one highly valuable compressed insight back to Earth.
Speaker 2: That's incredible.
Speaker 3: It turns a dial up connection into a pipeline of
Speaker 3: pure scientific discovery. And we are looking at deploying this
Speaker 3: in Earth orbiters tracking rapid climate change, planetary rovers, navigating
Speaker 3: the chaotic surface of Mars, and critically keeping living astronauts
Speaker 3: safe during crude missions to the Moon where split second
Speaker 3: life support is decisions are mandatory.
Speaker 2: Now I want to pivot here and ask the really
Speaker 2: vital grounding question. It is amazing that a probe near
Speaker 2: Jupiter will soon be able to think for itself, and
Speaker 2: it is incredible that astronauts will have vastly better life
Speaker 2: support computers. Right, but how does this commercial partnership with
Speaker 2: Microchip technology benefit you? The listener driving to work right now?
Speaker 2: What is the practical earthly application of this highly specific
Speaker 2: space hardware.
Speaker 3: This is where we see the historical pattern of space
Speaker 3: exploration accelerating terrestrial technology. Think about the engineering paradox NASA
Speaker 3: forced Microchip technology to solve here. Okay, build a processor
Speaker 3: capable of running advanced AI and processing immense amounts of
Speaker 3: sensor data instantly, but make it incredibly compact, energy efficient,
Speaker 3: and essentially indestructible against systemic failure.
Speaker 2: So they demanded indestructible AI computing.
Speaker 3: Indestructible. Now take that exact same processor architecture and install
Speaker 3: it into a commercial airplane. Oh wow, the aviation industry
Speaker 3: requires fault tolerant computing where an in flight system failure
Speaker 3: is simply not an option. Or to bring it directly
Speaker 3: to your morning commute, consider the chips powering autonomous vehicles.
Speaker 2: That makes perfect sense. A self driving car is basically
Speaker 2: a terrestrial spacecraft navigating dynamic hazards.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the chip sitting behind the dashboard of an autonomous
Speaker 3: car driving you to work relies on a massive influx
Speaker 3: of data from cameras, lightar, and radar to navigate unpredictable
Speaker 3: city streets safely. While it doesn't face the extreme cosmic
Speaker 3: radiation of deep space, it absolutely requires that same fault tolerance.
Speaker 3: If a component glitches while the car is traveling seventy
Speaker 3: miles an hour down a highway, it cannot freeze or
Speaker 3: enter a safe mode.
Speaker 2: No, definitely not.
Speaker 3: It needs to make a life or death decision in
Speaker 3: a fraction of a second, without waiting for a slow
Speaker 3: cellular cloud connection. By partnering with NASA to build the
Speaker 3: ultimate autonomous base brain, microchip is inadvertently designed the perfect
Speaker 3: processor for high stakes earthly industries.
Speaker 2: So the technological foundation that will land the next advanced
Speaker 2: rover on Mars is the exact same architecture that could
Speaker 2: eventually be making your drive to the grocery store infinitely safer.
Speaker 3: It's all connected.
Speaker 2: It really showcases the ultimate return on investment for pushing
Speaker 2: the boundaries of engineering. We set out today to understand
Speaker 2: how this new chip works, and the journey reveals that
Speaker 2: we are watching the evolution of our space program happen
Speaker 2: right now in real time.
Speaker 3: We really are.
Speaker 2: We are officially graduating from sending highly durable but ultimately
Speaker 2: remote controlled calculators out into the dark. We are moving
Speaker 2: toward deploying brilliant palm sized brains, brains that can pilot
Speaker 2: themselves through the void flawlessly, land on alien worlds, and
Speaker 2: accelerate our understanding of the universe by analyzing the cosmos
Speaker 2: entirely on their own.
Speaker 3: Is a profound shift in how we interact with the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and leaves you with something deeply fascinating to consider.
Speaker 2: What's that?
Speaker 3: Well, for decades, our spacecraft has strictly been our tools.
Speaker 3: They're incredibly complex tools, certainly, but ultimately they merely executed
Speaker 3: the exact commands we sent them from Earth.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: But if these new AI processors allow spacecraft to process
Speaker 3: massive amounts of environmental data, instantly react to the unexpected,
Speaker 3: and make their own critical decisions, millions of miles away
Speaker 3: from human intervention, well, at what point do they stop
Speaker 3: being just our tools and start becoming the actual explorers.
Speaker 2: Wow? That is a thought that will stick with me
Speaker 2: for a long time. The next time you look up
Speaker 2: at the night sky, remember that very soon there won't
Speaker 2: just be machines up there waiting for our instructions. There
Speaker 2: will be brilliant, palm sized brains thinking, reacting, and figuring
Speaker 2: out the vast, unforgiving void on their own. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for joining us for this conversation. Keep looking up,
Speaker 2: keep asking questions, and we will catch you next time.