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What changes when computing leaves Earth?

Missions, onboard computation and the engineering constraints of operating in orbit.

These are editorial connections, not a chain of causation or a shared score of progress.

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The evidence so far

DISCOVERY

An open model learns the Moon's surface. ↗

NASA and IBM released a Lunar Foundation Model trained primarily on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data for research tasks such as crater and volcanic-feature mapping and possible polar-ice analysis.

Source published 2026-09-10 · Emerging
DISCOVERY

A year of satellite observation, made lighter to carry. ↗

TESSERA provides 10-meter, pixel-wise annual embeddings learned from Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2. ESA says the model first launched in 2025; its repository and a peer-reviewed CVPR 2026 paper now document the work.

Source published 2026-06-04 · Demonstrated
DISCOVERY

An Earth model runs above the Earth. ↗

A compressed NASA–IBM Prithvi geospatial model ran on the Kanyini satellite and the ISS IMAGIN-e payload in flood and cloud detection demonstrations.

Source published 2026-05-07 · Experimental
DISCOVERY

A GPU goes into orbit. ↗

Starcloud says its Starcloud-1 satellite launched with an NVIDIA H100 and later trained nanoGPT in space.

Source published date unknown · Emerging

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What moved? ↗