Open source artificial intelligence (AI) is heading into space

IBM is no stranger to innovations in space, with a space flight chronology dating all the way back to 1944, when it helped to first design and build the automatic sequence Controlled Calculator for Harvard University which was used by Navy scientists to prepare ballistic tables. Almost 76 years later, IBM looks to be ready to join the space race with its latest foray into artificial intelligence (AI). According to the latest announcements from Big Blue, two new open source AI projects will look to take advantage of space technology in a bid to solve technical challenges around cube satellite communication and the growing problem of space junk. In correlation with the announcement, IBM's Space Tech Hub Team, led by engineer and space tech CTO, Naeem Altaf, unveiled the two open source projects named KubeSat and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system. IBM's newly open sourced project KubeSat is a cognitive autonomous framework that can be used to create and control satellite swarms and support additional software they need to perform specific tasks, while also enabling the simulation and optimization of multi-satellite communications.