IBM and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center have inked a collaboration to use IBM’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology to discover insights from NASA’s Earth and geospatial science data. The joint work will apply AI foundation model technology to NASA’s Earth-observing satellite data for the first time, IBM said in a statement.

IBM and NASA say they plan to develop several new technologies to extract insights from Earth observations. One project will train an IBM geospatial intelligence foundation model on NASA’s Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset, a record of land cover and land use changes captured by Earth-orbiting satellites.

Another output from this collaboration is expected to be a searchable corpus of Earth science literature. IBM says it has developed an NLP model trained on nearly 300,000 Earth science journal articles to organize the literature, containing AI workloads trained on Red Hat’s OpenShift software. The model also uses PrimeQA, IBM’s open-source multilingual question-answering system.

Other potential IBM-NASA joint projects in this agreement include constructing a foundation model for weather and climate prediction using MERRA-2, a dataset of atmospheric observations.

The collaboration is part of NASA’s Open-Source Science Initiative.

[Image courtesy: IBM]