NASA and IBM's open source lunar model turns 17 years of orbiter data into a foundation for lunar science

A foundation model is pretrained on large amounts of unlabeled data, then adapted to specific tasks with only a few labeled examples. NASA and IBM built one from nearly 2 million lunar image bundles, mostly from 17 years of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, feeding it the sun angles that shape how the surface looks.

Summary written with AI by HowTechMoves, based on reporting by The Decoder.