NASA announced Wednesday that it is deciphering the sun’s behavior with help from artificial intelligence.
In a press release, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said that, in conjunction with IBM among other partners, it has developed an AI model dubbed the Surya Heliophysics Foundational Model, which has been trained on nine years’ worth of data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Surya is Sanskrit for “sun.”
“We are advancing data-driven science by embedding NASA’s deep scientific expertise into cutting-edge AI models,” said NASA Chief Science Data Officer Kevin Murphy in the release. “By developing a foundation model trained on NASA’s heliophysics data, we’re making it easier to analyze the complexities of the sun’s behavior with unprecedented speed and precision.”
“This model empowers broader understanding of how solar activity impacts critical systems and technologies that we all rely on here on Earth,” he added.
Using solar data, Surya can analyze solar flares and make predictions regarding how space weather might impact technology such as communication systems and satellites, as well as power grids.
Surya can also forecast how UV from the sun affects the Earth’s upper atmosphere and determine solar wind speed.
“Our society is built on technologies that are highly susceptible to space weather,” said NASA’s Heliophysics Division Director Joseph Westlake in the release. “Just as we use meteorology to forecast Earth’s weather, space weather forecasts predict the conditions and events in the space environment that can affect Earth and our technologies.”
“We want to give Earth the longest lead time possible,” said solar physicist Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo Wednesday in a press release from IBM. “Our hope is that the model has learned all the critical processes behind our star’s evolution through time so that we can extract actionable insights.”
NASA also reports that while Surya is designed for Sun study, it can be adapted to engage several types of scientific explorations, including observing the Earth and conducting planetary science. Additionally, both the model and training datasets from Surya are available to try out online at Hugging Face, GitHub and in IBM’s TerraTorch library for fine-tuning geospatial AI models.
A benchmark dataset called “SuryaBench” has also been open sourced to the public.
“We’ve been on this journey of pushing the limits of technology with NASA since 2023, delivering pioneering foundational AI models to gain an unprecedented understanding of our planet Earth,” said Juan Bernabé-Moreno, the IBM director in charge of the scientific collaboration with NASA. “With Surya we have created the first foundation model to look the sun in the eye and forecast its moods.”
