Dikhyaa Mohanty 
NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, likely to take off as soon as March this year to send an Orion spacecraft around the Moon and it will carry Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa and Cisco Webex video collaboration system to deep space for the first time.
According to the official reports, flying on NASA’s Orion spacecraft during the uncrewed Artemis I mission will be ‘Callisto’, a technology demonstration developed through a reimbursable space act agreement with Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin has partnered with Amazon and Cisco to bring the Alexa digital assistant and Webex video collaboration aboard Orion’s first flight test in deep space.
The industry-funded payload will be located on Orion’s centre console and includes a tablet that will test Webex by Cisco video conferencing software to transmit video and audio from the Mission Control Center on earth. The custom-built hardware and software by Lockheed Martin and Amazon will test Alexa, Amazon’s voice-based virtual assistant, to respond to the transmitted audio.
The report further added that to function on Earth, Alexa uses the “the cloud”, or software and services that run on the internet, located on computer servers in data centres all over the globe. Participants will assist with the demonstration by asking Alexa a question or delivering a task command in front of a console with a camera and microphone. Their images and voices will be broadcast from mission control to Orion, where video of the participants will be displayed on the tablet, and audio played from the speaker, and then Alexa will capture the audio and respond.
