By Sarah Cope | 2025-12-26

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming space exploration and planetary defense, with recent advancements clearing barriers to space exploration and enhancing spacecrafts' autonomous operations.

AI’s ability to process and analyze huge quantities of data is key for tracking trends in space weather.

Improved forecasting helps with mission planning and the safeguarding of critical systems that rely on space infrastructure, such as internet services, emergency services and transportation.

In May 2024, NASA named its first chief AI officer to lead the agency's efforts to guide its "responsible use of AI in the cosmos and on Earth to benefit all humanity."

This year, NASA launched its Surya Heliophysics Foundational Model, an AI trained on nearly a decade of observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory that analyses an enormous amount of solar information.

Surya helps inform scientists’ understanding and improve their forecasting of solar eruptions and space weather patterns that can impact satellites and their associated communications and navigation systems.

Solar events also can threaten power grids on Earth by producing powerful currents that can overload transformers.

NASA’s 2024 AI Use Cases document lists an array of active AI-inclusive projects in areas such as autonomous exploration and navigation, space exploration and mission planning and management.

Among them is ASPEN, an AI-enabled tool that automates mission planning, pulling from all the necessary information related to resources, scheduling, and potential courses of action.

Space experts and agencies like NASA say AI is particularly well-suited for adding autonomy to Mars exploration as communication delays make Earth-based control impractical.

NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover uses AEGIS (Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science), a series of AI-powered algorithms that helps inform what samples it collects, for example, reducing the need for human input.

The agency's Perseverance Rover has an enhanced autonomous navigation system as well as an AI enabled task manager that helps it plan and execute its mission. AI technology also helps the rover traverse unfamiliar terrain.

As a leader in the application of AI, NASA has emphasized the importance of responsible AI development, ensuring transparency and accountability as it leverages new technologies.

The European Space Agency's AI Lab is advancing human-robot collaboration through virtual reality training systems and autonomous spacecraft operations.

Through the ESA’s Columbus program, a team of researchers studied AI’s data collection aboard the International Space Station’s Columbus module, producing a tool that can monitor telemetry data and identify potential issues.

Private sector innovation

Meanwhile, private companies are pioneering space-based data centers to address Earth's growing energy demands associated with AI.

The average AI-focused data center requires as much electricity as 100,000 households, and some of the largest under construction are projected to consume 20 times as much.

These energy intensive centers require large tracts of land and cooling water to operate, but space-based data centers offer a less environmentally taxing opportunity, per the International Energy Agency.

Without fluctuations in sunlight, space-based data centers could access nearly unlimited solar energy, the Scientific American reports.

Several private companies are pursuing this goal, with US-based startup Starcloud planning to build large-scale AI-powered orbital data centers.

"Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space," Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC in an interview published December 10.

"And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we’re facing on energy terrestrially," he said.

In early November, Starcloud launched its first satellite to test AI-powered communications in space. Starcloud-1 serves to test data processing while in orbit and prove advanced chip technologies can function in space.

As it orbits, the satellite has been operating Google’s open large language model Gemma in space and transmitting messages back to Earth.

Another company, Lonestar Data Holdings, aims to establish data centers on the moon’s surface by 2030.

By offsetting some of the energy limitations of Earth-bound power grids, space-based data centers could process satellite data in seconds rather than hours, facilitating even more powerful systems.