Self-driving spacecraft may save Earth from doomsday

From Fox News.com (April 8):

Judging by the valuations of companies such as Waymo, Lyft and Uber, humanity is placing a big bet on self-driving cars as the future of transportation. But the future of humanity itself may rest on the hopes of self-driving spacecraft.

The European Space Agency is currently developing a self-driving craft for its Hera planetary defense mission to the Didymos asteroid, which could happen as soon as 2023.

“If you think self-driving cars are the future on Earth, then Hera is the pioneer of autonomy in deep space,” Paolo Martino, lead systems engineer of ESA's proposed Hera mission, said in a statement. “While the mission is designed to be fully operated manually from ground, the new technology will be tested once the core mission objectives are achieved and higher risks can be taken.”

By functioning autonomously, the Hera spacecraft could steer itself in real-time, cutting down precious minutes in space and navigate around potentially treacherous objects in space. Similar to a self-driving car that uses a variety of different sensors and cameras, the spacecraft will also an array of technologies, ESA Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) Engineer Jesus Gil Fernandez, said.

In addition, Hera's onboard computer will have a dedicated image processing unit, akin to a graphics card in a PC.  [read more]