UAE Rashid Rover Will Test First Artificial Intelligence on the Moon

MCSS will receive the Rashid rover's navigation images via the Japanese lander, which will handle communications with Earth. With the Canadian company's algorithm, "every single pixel in the image (will be) classified as a certain terrain type," Reid said.

"That output will then be sent to the ground and will be used by scientists and engineers at our office in Ottawa, as well as at other Canadian universities, to help decide where the rover should go," he added.

Future missions will take humans "out of the loop" once engineers are confident the AI knows how to tell different minerals apart, and distinguish between critical mission items like rocks and craters.

On the moon, AI can save a lot of limited satellite bandwidth since it would only share the data, images, and videos that scientists need, Reid said. The tech can be repurposed all over the solar system, including applications like detecting "dark" ships on Earth trying to sail without registration, or filtering clouds from planetary images.