New Video Shows a Flyby of the Planet Mercury - with AI-Assisted Music
The "BepiColombo" mission, a joint European-Japanese effort, "has recently completed its third of six planned flybys of Mercury, capturing dozens of images in the process," reports the Byte:At its closest, the spacecraft soared within just 150 miles of Mercury. This occurred on the night side of the planet, however, too dark for optimal imaging. Instead, the first and nearest image was taken 12 minutes after the closest approach, at the still impressive proximity of some 1,100 miles above the surface. Now the ESA has spliced together 217 images from that flyby into a short video, which culminates with a zoomed-in closeup of Mercury's cratered surface. And the music in that video had a little help from AI, reports Phys.org:Music was composed for the sequence by ILA (formerly known as Anil Sebastian), with the assistance of AI tools developed by the Machine Intelligence for Musical Audio group, University of Sheffield. Music from the previous two flyby movies - composed by Maison Mercury Jones' creative director ILA and Ingmar Kamalagharan - was given to the AI tool to suggest seeds for the new composition, which ILA then chose from to edit and weave together with other elements into the new piece. The team at the University of Sheffield has developed an Artificial Musical Intelligence (AMI), a large-scale general-purpose deep neural network that can be personalized to individual musicians and use cases. The project with the University of Sheffield is aimed at exploring the boundaries of the ethics of AI creativity, while also emphasizing the essential contributions of the (human) composer. From the ESA's announcement:BepiColombo's next Mercury flyby will take place on 5 September 2024, but there is plenty of work to occupy the teams in the meantime... BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module will complete over 15 000 hours of solar electric propulsion operations over its lifetime, which together with nine planetary flybys in total - one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury - will guide the spacecraft towards Mercury orbit. The ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter modules will separate into complementary orbits around the planet, and their main science mission will begin in early 2026. One spaceflight blog notes the propulsive energy required for an eventual entry into the orbit of Mercury "is greater than that of a mission to fly by Pluto. "Only one other spacecraft has orbited Mercury, and that was NASA's MESSENGER probe, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015."
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