The AI model could help scientists better identify lunar ice, volcanos and craters.
A new open source AI model trained on NASA’s extensive lunar observation data is expected to help scientists better navigate moon colonisation plans.
The NASA‑IBM Lunar Foundation Model is one of the first publicly available foundation models for the scientific exploration of the moon, coming just months after the two organisations’ Prithvi AI made history by becoming the first geospatial foundation model to be deployed in orbit.
The Earth’s lunar neighbour has an arid and varied topography covered in craters, ice and volcanic activity – all picked up over the decades by various sensors and instruments. The petabytes of collected data, is, however, scattered across maps and images that need physical examination, or are accessible only by task specific machine learning models.
A domain-specific AI model could change how scientists analyse data, potentially accelerating how lunar geography is identified and understood. The Lunar Foundation Model achieves this by combining multimodal and multi-resolution observations.
