Analyze Mass Spectrometry data with Artificial Intelligence to assist the understanding of past habitability of Mars and provide insights for future missions

Abstract

This paper presents an application of artificial intelligence on mass spectrometry data for detecting habitability potential of ancient Mars. Although data was collected for planet Mars the same approach can be replicated for any terrestrial object of our solar system. Furthermore, proposed methodology can be adapted to any domain that uses mass spectrometry. This research is focused in data analysis of two mass spectrometry techniques, evolved gas analysis (EGA-MS) and gas chromatography (GC-MS), which are used to identify specific chemical compounds in geological material samples. The study demonstrates the applicability of EGA-MS and GC-MS data to extra-terrestrial material analysis. Most important features of proposed methodology includes square root transformation of mass spectrometry values, conversion of raw data to 2D sprectrograms and utilization of specific machine learning models and techniques to avoid overfitting on relative small datasets. Both EGA-MS and GC-MS datasets come from NASA and two machine learning competitions that the author participated and exploited. Complete running code for the GC-MS dataset/competition is available at GitHub.1 Raw training mass spectrometry data include [0, 1] labels of specific chemical compounds, selected to provide valuable insights and contribute to our understanding of the potential past habitability of Mars.