Where apps like Google Maps prove to be very helpful in navigation anywhere on Earth, NASA is planning to make similar navigation system to give directions in space.

Researchers from NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) and Intel are working towards a unique kind of planetary navigation system, making it easier to navigate a new planet with a little help from artificial intelligence (AI).

As per Futurism, researchers are hopeful that if an AI is fed enough pictures of the surface of a celestial body, a person could just take a photo of their surroundings and the system will be able to determine where they were and give them the directions to the place they wanted to be.

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In order to test it, the researchers created a virtual moon with the help of 2.4 million images of its would-be surface that were taken by a rover. The images taken by the would-be cameras were then fed to the AI that combined them to build the virtual moon. This was enough to efficiently enable navigation on the virtual moon’s surface.

For future, the researchers aim to try the method with real, non-simulated Mars, for which they believe they do not have enough satellite images yet. However, if this happens the first people to walk on the planet can easily navigate around the surface by just taking a picture.