A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China, one from Italy and one from Iceland has used a machine-learning artificial intelligence application to count and note the location of over 100,000 craters on the moon. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes programming their system to recognize craters by training it with data collected by Chinese lunar orbiters.

Prior work identifying and mapping craters on the moon has tended to be a slow process—it has generally been done by hand, with researchers studying photographs and transferring those observations to maps or moon globes. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to dramatically speed up the process by teaching a computer to identify craters and then to count them.

Teaching a computer to recognize craters on the moon has been a difficult process due to the many forms craters can take. Not all are round, and they are of different ages, which means defining characteristics have eroded over long periods of time.