NASA and IBM Research have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system pretrained on SomBench, a dataset of nearly two million co-registered lunar data bundles across 11 modalities. The model fuses imagery, topography, mineralogy, radar, gravity and other planetary datasets to help scientists analyze the Moon's surface, with USRA scientist Rachel Slank contributing planetary science expertise during development.
newsroom.usra.edu
· 2026-09-19
A new analysis suggests that future lunar settlements could tap abundant sunlight to generate massive amounts of solar electricity, potentially enough to support large populations. However, researchers warn that water, largely locked as ice in permanently shadowed lunar craters, may not be sufficient to sustain such large-scale habitation.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-15
NASA and IBM have jointly published an open-source AI system, along with a compiled dataset drawing on over 30 aligned data layers from nine instruments across four lunar missions. The model merges multiple imaging types, angles, and resolutions to let researchers study the Moon's surface more comprehensively than existing tools allow.
science.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-13
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