Artificial intelligence is often seen as a natural partner for space exploration. Missions demand automation, agility, and precision, but the risks of black-box models make adoption difficult. Nitish Kumar, scientist at ISRO and recipient of its Innovative Young Scientist Award, explained why intelligibility and explainability are central to AI in space.
Addressing the gathering at Cypher 25, India’s largest AI conference organised by AIM from September 17-19 in Bengaluru, Kumar said that while AI and space appear aligned, the reality is complex. The sector is “automation hungry,” he noted, but reluctant to trust opaque models. “Spacecrafts demand explainability, agility, and assurance,” he said.
Innovation as Thought Work
He broke down intelligence into perception, cognition, and action, linking AI systems to human self-reflection. His questions—“can we perceive cognition?”—highlighted the philosophical roots of ISRO’s work.
“One of the bottlenecks [of developing AI] is we don’t understand our own thinking; it is very difficult to understand how AI thinks,” he said. For him, “perception without aberration of thoughts is the higher form of intelligence.”
Solar Cells to Space Doctors
Kumar illustrated how abstract ideas drive practical breakthroughs. Observing bats led him to reimagine solar cell defect detection through “distraction” rather than attention, a method called delentropy that achieved near-perfect accuracy and is now patented. The same approach powered MEND, an AI system that predicts satellite anomalies 10–15 minutes before failure, giving ISRO a vital safety window.
His team has also experimented with generative AI. Gyaan, a virtual employee turned educational assistant, has reached 22,000 schools in Bihar. A “Medical AI Doctor in Space” project aims to support astronauts, using an approach called anticipative assessment that forces models to pause until enough data is available.
For Kumar, AI is more than engineering. “If AI is not deterministic, we cannot apply it to space technology,” he said. Comparing it to the industrial revolution, he argued that AI represents a shift “from muscle power to steam power to electric power to nuclear power. This is a totally different game. It is a mental game.”
He closed by urging India to shape AI globally, not just apply it locally. In his view, agility and intelligibility will decide whether AI can be trusted to operate in space, where uncertainty is the only constant.
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