‘Alexa, land on the Moon’: Amazon’s assistant will be used in NASA’s Artemis mission

Alexa is used for more than losing music, telling us a joke, or telling us how long it will be tomorrow. He is going on a trip to the Moon!

In the missions to the moon In the 1960s and 1970s, the computers they used were thousands of times slower than a smartwatch.

The next mission to the Moon will use much more sophisticated computers, but that in our eyes are already an antiquity: they will have 2002 processors.

The reason is that they have undergone thousands of tests over the years and must be protected against radiation and extreme temperatures, so they have to be reliable, newly released chips cannot be used.

These 20-year-old computers will have installed a software called Callisto, created by Lockheed Martin.

Callisto is composed of the assistant Alexa, and a video conferencing software called Webex, created by Cisco.

It is a version of Alexa created to work on computers from 2002, and it can also do it autonomously, without connecting to the internet, since there will be moments when communication with the Earth will be lost, on the far side of the Moon.

Alexa has also been adapted for accept the 2 second delays between the Earth and the Moon, as well as ignoring the ship’s engines and other noises from space, as he explains Amazon’s press release.

The virtual assistant Alexa thus becomes one more member of the crew than will travel to the Moon on NASA’s Artemis Mission.

Alexa’s task will be communicate with the base on Earth, Y launch various instruments using voice commands.

The Mission Artemis The Sagebrush NASA aims put astronauts on the Moon in 2024 or 2025.

But before that several unmanned preparatory missions are to be carried out.

After a couple of delays, it is expected that the Artemis I mission takes off next March. The unmanned Orion spacecraft, with Alexa as its assistant, will go around the Moon.

From the base they will communicate remotely with Alexa to test the software.

The ultimate goal is that Amazon’s assistant accompanies astronauts and helps them communicate and control certain non-critical systems with voice, to make your job easier.

Blue Origin rockets may not travel to the Moon, but at least Jeff Bezos will see one of his creatures, Alexa, land on our satellite.