08-04-2025
Japan succeeds in rapid identification of rocks on asteroids using AI
A University of Tokyo team has said that it has managed to rapidly identify from photographs the size, location and shape of some 200,000 rocks on two asteroids using artificial intelligence technology.
The photos of asteroid Ryugu were taken by Japan's Hayabusa2 unmanned asteroid probe, while those of asteroid Bennu were taken by the U.S. probe Osiris-Rex. The findings were published Monday in the British journal Scientific Reports.
The team, including university project researcher Yuta Shimizu and professor Hideaki Miyamoto, hopes to apply its findings not only to planetary science but also the fields of civil engineering and disaster prevention on Earth.
In its research, the team fed an AI system information on some 70,000 rocks on Earth and other celestial bodies and developed an automatic rock identification tool.
After being fed some 10,000 high-resolution photos of Ryugu and Bennu, the tool identified some 20,000 rocks at least 1 meter in size on the surface of Ryugu and around 180,000 of such rocks on Bennu.
The team also looked at the distribution of rocks of different sizes on the surfaces of the two asteroids.
Flows of rocks, soil and sands on Earth show that their sizes observed tend to increase gradually toward the farthest point reached.
The AI-based research found that such sediment had flowed from the equator to the two poles of Ryugu, while such sediment had made its way from the poles to the equator on Bennu.
The directions were opposite due to the differing centrifugal forces of the two asteroids, with Ryugu having a 7.6-hour rotation period, against Bennu's 4.3 hours.
The automatic identification process takes half a day per asteroid, which is swift, according to the team. The technology will be utilized on Japan's Martian Moons Exploration mission, slated to be launched in fiscal 2026.
"We expect that (our research) will also be used to detect signs of a rock collapse on Earth by flying drones regularly to take photos of (mountain) slopes and identifying many rocks," Shimizu said.
