The article for this weeks blog post, is one that comes from SpaceNews.com and written by Zhenping Li. The article is about the use of Artificial Intelligence on satellites in orbit, as discussed heavily during last weeks class guest speaker, the use of AI in space is what much of the policy coming out of todays government and private sector seems to be concerning. So… it naturally made me give the article a second look after skimming the headlines this week.

Specifically the article talks about the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) weather monitoring satellite network known as the Geostationary Operations Environmental Satellites (GOES) program. There are a total of four satellites in GEO orbit that have the extremely important mission to monitor weather patterns and conditions to provide pattern recognition and prediction of events that could bring harm and danger to the western hemisphere. While these satellites themselves are super interesting and warrant their own discussion the interesting part that I found, was that NOAA introduced a AI algorithm into the network that is intended to monitor, predict and provide actions to the network the keep the entire system functioning properly and ultimately extends the life of the network. The analogy I would use, is if you have a human driven car vs a AI enabled self driving car, the AI enabled car is going to last long, go further and overall perform better than that of a human driven car, because the AI will ensure that the system (tool) is being employed properly in every way.

According to the article the AI system titled Advanced Intelligent Monitoring System (AIMS) “rapidly analyzes the data and provides actionable information to those responsible for the operations, health and safety of the GOES systems. AIMS’s AI capabilities allow it to detect any data pattern changes and predict failures based on those pattern changes over time”. A truly critical capability is successful.

I wanted to discuss this article because during my read of it, I began to find myself wondering, how is this system guarded? An adversary looking to do harm would not need to necessarily target the GOES network itself, instead it could look to target the AI algorithm. By altering its ability to properly perform its function. It made me realize that the need for a strong cyber security protocol for use on AI is abundantly warranted.

Respectfully

Eric A.

Reference: https://spacenews.com/ai-already-improving-operations-noaa-goesr-weather-environmental-satellites/