Artificial intelligence in planetary science and astronomy: Applications and research potential

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most influential fields of the 21st century (Zhang et al., 2021). Rich, E (2019) candidly described it as “the study of how to make computers do things which, at the moment, people do better”, today AI often surpasses human ability in tasks like large scale data mining and pattern recognition - its true strength. AI’s subfields - Machine Learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), play a critical role in expanding the usage to a vast variety of fields like planetary science, astronomy, earth observations, and remote sensing, just to name a few. There is an expected inclination towards incorporating AI more frequently in the studies of planetary science given the vast and complex nature of planetary data. In fact, AI has already been instrumental in extracting meaningful insights and advancing research in both interplanetary and astronomical studies. In planetary sciences, several AI techniques have been employed in order to bridge gaps in our understanding of the varied patterns and occurrences for studying the natural features observable from the data returned by scientific payloads. For example, PCA and cluster analysis can help in detecting patterns of compositional variation from multi and hyper-spectral imagery (Moussaoui et al., 2008; D’Amore & Padovan, 2022). Furthermore, to study specific features and patterns in their occurrences, correlations with neighbouring features; unsupervised algorithms and more complex -supervised techniques can be helpful depending on the scale of the task. From simple methods of unsupervised learning like clustering used to study the spectral signatures of Jezero crater on Mars (Pletl et al., 2023) to applying large language models to track asteroids affected by gravitational effects which alter the asteroid’s orbit (Carruba et al., 2025), such applications highlight the prospects of AI in the field of planetary science. Henceforth, to develop a deeper understanding of the potential and applications of ML, below is a typical AI workflow.