What Happened
AI Milestone Achieved in Space-Based Sensors
For the first time, an Earth observation satellite has used AI to find what it was looking for on its own, without human analysts on the ground. The milestone, which occurred in April, was achieved by a spacecraft built by Loft Orbital, using a software package developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The AI model, called Gemma 3, is a vision-language model that combines the contextual understanding of large language models with the ability to analyze imagery. This development could make space sensors more useful and efficient, and may pave the way for new scientific tools and applications. The achievement was first reported by TechCrunch.