NASA Puts Google’s Gemma Large Language Model in Orbit

IEEE Spectrum · 2 months ago · 17

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory deployed Google's Gemma 3 language model aboard a satellite for the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model analyzing satellite imagery, showing that researchers can now interact with spacecraft using natural language prompts instead of structured commands. The 4-bit Gemma 3 4B model achieved 88 percent accuracy on a benchmark of 7,960 images without being trained on that specific dataset, and ran on an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX module consuming only 8GB of memory. The capability enables satellites to compress image data into text summaries, potentially reducing wildfire detection delays from 90 minutes to near-real-time and opening a new paradigm for spacecraft control via prompts rather than traditional software updates.