Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy for the Detection of Microscopy Biosignatures on the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor

The quest to find extraterrestrial life is a critical scientific endeavor with civilization-level implications. Icy moons in our solar system are promising targets for exploration because their liquid oceans make them potential habitats for microscopic life. However, the lack of a precise definition of life poses a fundamental challenge to formulating detection strategies. To increase the chances of unambiguous detection, a suite of complementary instruments must sample multiple independent biosignatures (e.g., composition, motility/behavior, and visible structure). Such an instrument suite could generate 10,000x more raw data than is possible to transmit from distant ocean worlds like Enceladus or Europa. To address this bandwidth limitation, Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy (OSIA) is an emerging discipline of flight systems capable of evaluating, summarizing, and prioritizing observational instrument data to maximize science return. We describe two OSIA implementations developed as part of the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor (OWLS) prototype instrument suite at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The first identifies life-like motion in digital holographic microscopy videos, and the second identifies cellular structure and composition via innate and dye-induced fluorescence. Flight-like requirements and computational constraints were used to lower barriers to infusion, similar to those available on the Mars helicopter, "Ingenuity." We evaluated the OSIA's performance using simulated and laboratory data and conducted a live field test at the hypersaline Mono Lake planetary analog site. Our study demonstrates the potential of OSIA for enabling biosignature detection and provides insights and lessons learned for future mission concepts aimed at exploring the outer solar system.

K-textures, a self supervised hard clustering deep learning algorithm for satellite images segmentation

Deep learning self supervised algorithms that can segment an image in a fixed number of hard labels such as the k-means algorithm and only relying only on deep learning techniques are still lacking. Here, we introduce the k-textures algorithm which provides self supervised segmentation of a 4-band image (RGB-NIR) for a $k$ number of classes. An example of its application on high resolution Planet satellite imagery is given. Our algorithm shows that discrete search is feasible using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and gradient descent. The model detects $k$ hard clustering classes represented in the model as $k$ discrete binary masks and their associated $k$ independently generated textures, that combined are a simulation of the original image. The similarity loss is the mean squared error between the features of the original and the simulated image, both extracted from the penultimate convolutional block of Keras 'imagenet' pretrained VGG-16 model and a custom feature extractor made with Planet data. The main advances of the k-textures model are: first, the $k$ discrete binary masks are obtained inside the model using gradient descent. The model allows for the generation of discrete binary masks using a novel method using a hard sigmoid activation function. Second, it provides hard clustering classes -- each pixels has only one class. Finally, in comparison to k-means, where each pixel is considered independently, here, contextual information is also considered and each class is not associated only to a similar values in the color channels but to a texture. Our approach is designed to ease the production of training samples for satellite image segmentation. The model codes and weights are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6359859