A satellite just learned to find things on its own — here’s what that means

“Now that we’ve proven the concept, that’s really the direction of travel,” Lasserre said. The goal is to build out the constellation to ensure real-time coverage of anywhere on Earth, which which he says would take somewhere between 50 and 100 satellites like Yam-9. (Loft currently operates 12 spacecraft on orbit.)

Lessons learned deploying these smaller models on orbit will inform how companies attempt to deploy larger-scale compute infrastructure in space, particularly in the prosaic-but-vital areas of power and memory management.

They could also pave the way for new scientific tools. The idea for NAVI-Space began with JPL Researcher Taran Cyriac John, who was thinking about digital assistants for astronauts exploring the Moon or Mars.

“We’re thinking, okay, you have astronauts with pressurized suits, and you know they cannot be tapping on a keyboard, whatever they want to do is complex.” Delfa Victoria said. “So, how about we provide an assistant, like in video games and in movies, where you see an AI which is interactive?”

Just don’t call it HAL 9000.