AI BriefingNASA Prithvi, First Orbital Demonstration
Key point
NASA and IBM's Prithvi geospatial foundation model has completed its first orbital demonstration aboard the ISS and a satellite.
Details
Researchers from NASA, Adelaide University, and SmartSat CRC deployed a lightweight version of Prithvi Geospatial on the Kanyini satellite and the IMAGIN-e payload aboard the ISS, carrying out the first orbital demonstration of an Earth observation foundation model.
The experiment compared flood detection and cloud detection performance across two orbital platforms and different computing environments, and the results were published as an arXiv preprint.
Prithvi is an open-source model released by NASA and IBM, trained on 13 years of Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data. The researchers explained that being open source allowed them to carry out the demonstration quickly without having to train a new model.
- New tasks can be handled by adding only a small decoder package, instead of re-uploading the entire model.
- Satellites can analyze data directly in orbit before sending it to the ground, speeding up disaster response and observation.
- NASA is also expanding foundation models for planetary, astronomical, and bio/physical sciences, including Surya.
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