A team of researchers from Adelaide University and the SmartSat Cooperative Research Center in South Australia has successfully uploaded and demonstrated NASA and IBM’s open-source Prithvi Geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model aboard two in-orbit platforms, making it the first geospatial foundation model to be deployed in orbit. Trained on 13 years’ worth of data, Prithvi can facilitate a wide variety of Earth observation tasks.
By uploading a compressed version of Prithvi to the South Australian government’s Kanyini satellite and to the Thales Alenia Space IMAGIN-e (ISS Mounted Accessible Global Imaging Nod-e) payload aboard the International Space Station, the researchers tested the model’s flood and cloud detection performance across two different orbiting platforms and computing environments.
The team chose Prithvi for their research because of its strong generalization across Earth observation tasks, and because of its availability as an open-source model.
“If Prithvi weren’t open source, I would have to train my own foundation model,” said Dr. Andrew Du, the project’s lead researcher, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Adelaide University and an AI engineer at the SmartSat Cooperative Research Center. “Having that model openly available saved a lot of time and effort.”
A foundation model is an AI model trained on an enormous amount of unlabeled data, which …