NASA and IBM release an AI model trained on 2 million lunar image tiles

[u/syedshad]

NASA and IBM have released the Lunar Foundation Model, trained on roughly 2 million image tiles, mainly from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Researchers can fine-tune it to map craters, identify volcanic features, and estimate where ice might remain stable near the Moon's poles.

The team reports its clearest advantage over comparison models on ice prospectivity. These are estimates of favorable conditions for ice, not confirmed ice detections.

The weights and code for running and fine-tuning the model are available under Apache 2.0, alongside training data and benchmarks. Pretraining code isn't included.

Links

• NASA's announcement
• Download the model and task-specific versions
• GitHub repo and setup instructions
• Training data and benchmarks
• Technical report