Juan Bernabé-Moreno

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IBM and NASA release open-source AI model for lunar exploration

As of September 2026: Leading IBM's team on the Lunar Foundation Model

NASA is targeting 2028 for humans to walk on the Moon again. Before astronauts land, scientists must find ice in shadowed craters and identify safe terrain. On September 11, that mapping work got a new tool: an open-source AI model built by IBM and NASA.

Updated Sep 11

Notable Quotes

One of the reasons we've never seen a comprehensive, powerful lunar model before is that we didn't have the data organized in the right way.

from IBM and NASA release open-source AI model for lunar exploration · Updated Sep 11

That alone is a massive scientific contribution, because put the model aside: the community now has a co-registered dataset with more than two million data points. And we know that AI models get superseded by other models. The data is what really creates the value.

from IBM and NASA release open-source AI model for lunar exploration · Updated Sep 11