Space AI Goes Live: Prithvi Becomes First Geospatial Model in Orbit
NASA and IBM’s open-source Prithvi geospatial AI foundation model was uploaded to two in-orbit platforms—the Kanyini satellite and the ISS-mounted IMAGINE payload—making it the first geospatial foundation model deployed in space. Trained on 13 years of Landsat/Sentinel-2 data, Prithvi demonstrated flood and burn-scar detection and can be updated on orbit with small decoder packages, enabling faster Earth observation analyses and potential natural-language interactions with onboard instruments in the future.