Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have created a system that can perform autonomous research in astrobiology, the study of the origins of life in the Universe.
AstroAgents comprises eight ‘AI agents’ that analyse data and generate scientific hypotheses. It joins a suite of other AI tools that aim to automate the process of science, from reading the literature to coming up with hypotheses and even writing papers.
The tool’s creators say they will use it to study samples that NASA plans to retrieve from Mars. The agents will help to determine whether the samples harbour organic molecules that indicate the presence of past or present life. The researchers presented AstroAgents on 27 April at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Singapore.
“It’s helping us build a better understanding of how molecules form in space, how molecules form from life on Earth and how they’re preserved — and then which specific signs should we be searching for,” says astrobiologist Denise Buckner at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who co-authored a preprint describing AstroAgents1.
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