The Portuguese Space Agency (PT Space) has announced the winners of the 2024 edition of PROSSE – PROdex for Science in Space Exploration, a prestigious initiative aimed at funding scientific projects in the field of space exploration in Portugal. Two research projects emerged as selected to receive financial support to advance their groundbreaking research.

UNFORSEEN, the project proposed by the Institute of Systems and Robotics in Lisbon (ISR|Lisboa), aims to revolutionize the detection of craters on the surface of Mars. This project uses unsupervised deep learning techniques to overcome the limitations of current supervised models, potentially leading to significant advancements in planetary exploration.

Margarida Silveira, Principal Investigator and Instituto Superior Técnico Profesor, explained the rationale behind the UNFORSEEN project: “The vast majority of current approaches to crater detection require large amounts of annotated data for training, which is extremely time-consuming. The availability of much larger amounts of unannotated data allows the exploitation of unsupervised methods for the automatic detection and localization of craters. This is important since impact craters are an essential source of information about the geology and surface of Mars, and their accurate detection is also crucial for determining the characteristics of asteroid and meteoroid populations.”

The two projects will now move forward to the contractual phase with ESA’s PRODEX team. The other funded project is focused on mitigating muscular loss in astronauts, which can also be applied in the field of population aging. Both projects will receive funding and international support. “The technical expertise and oversight provided by ESA’s specialists are crucial to ensuring the successful implementation of these projects,” emphasized Marta Gonçalves, Scientific Program Manager at the Portuguese Space Agency.