AI to help study first images from James Webb Space Telescope

A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most powerful space observatory ever built.

Hey Guys,

This article will be part of my “Benefactor” Column. I am passionate about the A.I. for Good movement.

If you aren’t sure with what I am doing on Substack, you can just dip your toes in and listen up.

For the summer as a time limited offer, I’m extending the usual 7 day free trial into two weeks.

BENEFACTOR

This column is about A.I. in healthcare and A.I for good articles. Artificial intelligence may empower and augment us. This is that story.

I don’t know about you but I really love the idea of A.I. helping us understand the galaxy, our place in the Universe and helping us find colonizable planets near our location. This is a high priority mission of our species wishes to diminish the chances of extinction in the near to medium term.

In a few months of AiSupremacy writing, I’ve covered A.I. at the intersection of Astronomy more than once.

Can machine learning empower science, augment healthcare and give humanity a better future? I’d like to think it can.

This is to me a feel good story. The James Webb Space Telescope is pretty amazing!

The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are set to be released on 12 July, and it is expected that AI will play a key role in analyzing the received data.

GPUs will play a crucial part in numerous high-profile attempts to analyze data from the groundbreaking telescope located a million miles distant from Earth.

This story was aired on the web at the beginning of June, 2022. But it’s potential has lingered with me. It was covered by The Register and Silicon Republic, among others.

Some astronomers will be running machine-learning algorithms on the data to detect and classify galaxies in deep space at a level of detail never seen before. Brant Robertson, an astrophysics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the US believes the telescope's snaps will lead to breakthroughs that will help us better understand how the universe formed some 13.7 billion years ago.

Morpheus!

A machine learning model called Morpheus will be used to detect and classify galaxies in deep space, to help map the earliest structures in the universe.

A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest and most powerful space observatory ever built.

It’s a miracle of engineering and Space-technology and global collaboration.

Scientists are busy working on machine learning models to help analyze and quickly classify the vast amounts of data to come from their new eye on the cosmos.

“What’s great about AI and machine learning is that you can train a model to actually make those decisions for you in a way that is less hands-on and more based on a set of metrics that you define,” Prof Brant Robertson told Nvidia’s chief blogger Brian Caulfield.

Machine learning collaboration is reaching a point of global scale that it can start to impact major elements of our future such as Space-technology, healthcare, education, genomics, robotics and the future of the internet and ambient computing itself.

What does Morpheus Do?

Robertson, an astronomy and astrophysics professor at UC Santa Cruz, is one of the scientists behind Morpheus, a powerful AI for detecting and classifying galaxies.

Morpheus is a machine learning model that generates pixel-level morphological classifications of astronomical sources. Tech giant Nvidia said that its GPUs will help accelerate Morpheus across multiple platforms.

• A.I. is being actively used to help classify and map stellar objects in Astronomy.

"The JWST data is exciting because it gives us an unprecedented window on the infrared universe, with a resolution that we've only dreamed about until now," he told The Register. Robertson helped develop Morpheus, a machine-learning model trained to pore over pixels and pick out blurry blob-shaped objects from the deep abyss of space and determine whether these structures are galaxies or not, and if so, of what type.

Astronomers like Physicians, are being augmented by A.I. do their job better and save time. This is all happening rather rapidly in the 2020s.

• The software will be used as part of the COSMOS-Webb program, the largest and most ambitious project the telescope will undertake in its first year.

• Robertson and a team of nearly 50 researchers will survey half-a-million galaxies from a patch of the sky; they'll be hunting for the oldest, fully-evolved galaxies to study how dark matter evolved over time as these structures began hosting stars, and use the software to automate this process.

Some of my favorite Astronomy articles on the web are from BigThink, you should check them out. I could read that content all day!

Morpheus was previously used to help classify images for the Hubble Space Telescope. With a growing team and advancements in machine learning, Robertson said the AI model will be used for “all of the major extragalactic JWST surveys” conducted in its first year.

It’s ironic that A.I. would become our senses in the Cosmos!

The COSMOS-Webb project

Robertson and a team of nearly 50 researchers will be using the AI model as part of the COSMOS-Webb project. This is an ambitious plan to use JWST to map the earliest structures in the universe.

The telescope will survey a large patch of the sky with its near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras, across more than 200 hours of observing time.

As part of the project, the researchers plan to survey half a million galaxies with multiband, high-resolution, near-infrared imaging, along with 32,000 galaxies in mid-infrared imaging.

We now know there’s likely trillions of galaxies in our Universe alone.

A.I. as our Eyes into the Universe

“The JWST will really enable us to see the universe in a new way that we’ve never seen before,” Robertson said. “So it’s really exciting.”

JWST

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Since the project was first envisioned in 1996, its costs have overrun from $0.5 billion to almost $10 billion.

The JWST sits at a point further from Earth than Hubble, which orbits at an altitude of around 570km above Earth’s surface.

JWST was fully deployed on 8 January 2022 and reached its destination on 24 January. On 16 March 2022, it focussed all its mirrors on a single star for the first time. These are milestones with humanity, but it just goes to show that A.I. is right there along with us.

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