NASA and IBM release open-source Lunar Foundation Model

NASA and IBM released the Lunar Foundation Model, one of the first open-source AI models for lunar science. It was trained on nearly 2 million tile bundles, mostly from 17 years of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data. It reduces error in predicting polar ice deposits.

Why it matters: Foundation-model pretraining on a large, unlabeled scientific archive is spreading beyond Earth observation to planetary science. Better polar ice estimates feed directly into landing-site selection for future missions, and the open release lets outside groups fine-tune it for their own tasks.