**The Red (Hot?) Planet**

by Patrick L. Barry

Don\'t let Mars\'s cold, quiet demeanor fool you. For much of its
history, the Red Planet has been a fiery world.

Dozens of volcanoes that dot the planet\'s surface stand as monuments to
the eruptions that once reddened Mars\'s skies with plumes of glowing
lava. But the planet has settled down in its old age, and these
volcanoes have been dormant for hundreds of millions of years.

Or have they? Some evidence indicates that lava may have flowed on Mars
much more recently. Images of the Martian surface taken by orbiting
probes show regions of solidified lava with surprisingly few impact
craters, suggesting that the volcanic rock is perhaps only a million
years old.

If so, could molten lava still occasionally flow on the surface of Mars
today?

With the help of some artificial intelligence software, a heat-sensing
instrument currently orbiting Mars aboard NASA\'s Mars Odyssey
spacecraft could be just the tool for finding active lava flows.

\"Discovering such flows would be a phenomenally exciting scientific
finding,\" says Steve Chien, supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence
Group at JPL. For example, volcanic activity could provide a source of
heat, thus making it more likely that Martian microbes might be living
in the frosty soil.

The instrument, called THEMIS (for Thermal Emission Imaging System), can
\"see\" the heat emissions of the Martian surface in high
resolution---each pixel in a THEMIS image represents only 100 meters on
the ground. But THEMIS produces about five times more data than it can
transmit back to Earth.

Scientists usually know ahead of time which THEMIS data they want to
keep, but they can\'t plan ahead for unexpected events like lava flows.
So Chien and his colleagues are customizing artificial intelligence
software called ScienceCraft to empower THEMIS to identify important
data on its own.

This decision-making ability of the ScienceCraft software was first
tested in Earth orbit aboard a satellite called Earth Observing-1 by
NASA\'s New Millennium Program. Earth Observing-1 had already completed
its primary mission, and the ScienceCraft experiment was part of the New
Millennium Program's Space Technology 6 mission.

On Odyssey, ScienceCraft will look for anomalous hotspots on the cold,
night side of Mars and flag that data as important. \"Then the satellite
can look at it more closely on the next orbit,\" Chien explains.

Finding lava is considered a long shot, but since THEMIS is on all the
time, \"it makes sense to look,\" Chien says. Or better yet, have
ScienceCraft look for you---it's the intelligent thing to do.

To learn more about the Autonomous ScienceCraft software and see an
animation of how it works, visit
[http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov](http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov/) .

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California
Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.

![](media/image1.jpeg){width="3.236111111111111in"
height="4.513888888888889in"}

Caption:

*Just as changing cloud patterns on Earth were identified using Earth
Observing-1's Advanced Land Imager along with ScienceCraft software, the
THEMIS instrument with ScienceCraft on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft can
avoid transmitting useless images.*

*Note to editors:*

*This image may be downloaded at
<http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/news_images/sciencecraft_process.jpg>.*