The Middle East's push into the space race has received a much needed thrust from the Emirati Mars mission's success, which was followed by several satellite launches and announcements for more. Buoyed by the cosmic feats of its Hope Probe, the UAE is also preparing for a moon mission slated for a launch next year, which will place a robotic rover on the lunar surface.

Emiratis may be leading the regional space race, but they aren't alone since neighbours like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait are racing ahead with their own plans to explore the cosmos. After launching two satellites this year, Saudi Arabia has empowered researchers to create a smart tool, which can identify suitable terrain on the moon for landing future vehicles.

The system developed by experts at the King Abdullah University, in collaboration with their peers at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, uses AI to spot craters and rilles on the lunar surface. Craters indicate uneven, raised plots of land, while rilles are trenches or valleys which may create difficulties for a spacecraft to descend.

The team came together to conduct two key tasks to empower computer vision, the first of which was to collect information on all craters and cracks on the moon. Some tuning was required to facilitate creation of a database, without any help from human beings.

After this was done, the researchers created a high resolution moon net, to train AI in identifying craters and rilles at the samet time. For this the deep learning mechanism has two independent networks that work in tandem for accurate identification of both features simultaneously.

Assembling this entire infrastructure has allowed machine learning to automatically create a map of suitable sites for landing, so that space explorers can make informed decisions.

Saudi Arabia's stellar achievement has been unveiled at a time when UAE is enhancing its rover Rashid with high resolution cameras to study the surface of the moon, and observe how such vehicles can move better.

Regional minds have also come up with a method to extract oxygen from lunar soil, so that efficiency of future cosmic missions can be ramped up.