NASA and IBM announced the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model on September 10, an open-source AI system that turns more than a decade of lunar observations into detailed maps. Trained on over 30 data layers from nine instruments aboard four NASA missions including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, it fuses imagery, topographic, thermal and spectroscopic measurements to detect crater rims, volcanic vents and potential ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters — boosting feature-detection accuracy up to 23% over conventional methods.

IBM describes it as one of the first publicly available foundation models purpose-built for lunar science, following the open Prithvi geospatial models for Earth observation.