Artificial intelligence could aid in the search for life on alien planets and detection of nearby asteroids, according to NASA officials.

NASA hopes to use artificial intelligence, or A.I., technologies such as machine learning to interpret data that will be collected by future telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, according to a statement from the space agency.

“These technologies are very important, especially for big data sets and especially in the exoplanet field,” Giada Arney, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. “Because the data we’re going to get from future observations is going to be sparse and noisy. It’s going to be really hard to understand. So using these kinds of tools has so much potential to help us.”

NASA has partnered with companies such as Intel, IBM and Google to develop advanced- machine-learning techniques. Every summer, NASA also brings technology and space innovators together for an eight-week program called Frontier Development Lab (FDL).

“FDL feels like some really good musicians with different instruments getting together for a jam session in the garage, finding something really cool, and saying, ‘Hey we’ve got a band here,'” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, a NASA Goddard astrobiologist, said in the NASA statement.

Read more: space