China's Tiangong space station. (Image credit: China Manned Space Engineering Office)Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station have a new crewmate: an AI chatbot designed to support taikonauts during in-orbit missions.The chatbot has been called Wukong AI after a popular character named Sun Wukong who features in the mythical Chinese legend of the ‘Monkey King’. The character is said to represent qualities such as cunningness, adaptability, endurance, and the pursuit of knowledge.Wukong AI has been designed to aid taikonauts in navigation and tactical planning. The chatbot went live on the space station last month, and it has already completed its first space mission by providing support to three taikonauts during a spacewalk.“This system can provide rapid and effective information support for complex operations and fault handling by crew members, improving work efficiency, in-orbit psychological support, and coordination between space and ground teams,” Zou Pengfei of the taikonaut training center, was quoted as saying by Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.This is the first time that China has introduced a large language model (LLM) aboard its Tiangong space station, which is reportedly pivotal to the country’s space ambitions. It comes at a time when the space race is intensifying among South Asian countries, including India. Recently, US space agency NASA accelerated its plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon after similar announcements from China and Russia.Wukong AI has been described as a traditional question-and-answer LLM. It comprises two modules. While one module of the chatbot is installed on the space station to help the crew solve various challenges, the ground module on Earth is designed to perform in-depth analysis. The two combined modules reportedly enable the chatbot to act as an advanced AI assistant that “offers very comprehensive content” while adapting to each mission in outer space.More details about how the AI chatbot was developed are limited, but reports by Xinhua news agency suggest that Wukong has been built on top of a domestic ‘open-source’ AI model.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Chinese AI startup DeepSeek releases upgraded model with domestic chip supportIt has been further trained on aerospace flight data and fine-tuned by engineers to aid in China’s manned space mission. Wukong AI is said to have gone live on the space station on July 15. However, it began providing support to taikonauts aboard the station earlier this month.Wukong AI reportedly provided assistance to the crew of the Tiangong station during a six-and-a-half-hour mission, which involved taikonauts taking a spacewalk, installing space debris protection devices, and performing a routine inspection of the station.Also Read | A short history of China’s rise as a space powerChina’s space station reportedly doubles as a microgravity laboratory for experiments that would be impossible on Earth. It also has plans to use the space station for intermediate logistics and training in the future.© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd