# NASA and IBM release open lunar foundation model on Hugging Face

_Friday, September 11, 2026 at 10:40 AM EDT · AI, Science · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![NASA and IBM release open lunar foundation model on Hugging Face — Primary](https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2026/release-of-open-ai-mod.jpg)

NASA and IBM Research released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI model built for lunar science, hosted publicly on Hugging Face with its codebase on GitHub.

NASA said the model was trained primarily on 17 years of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, including roughly 2 million image tiles drawn from more than 1 million high-resolution camera images at 1-meter resolution and nearly 964,000 multispectral images at 100-meter resolution. NASA said the model matched or exceeded several strong baseline models across all evaluated tasks, with a clear advantage in estimating polar ice stability.

Planetary scientists can fine-tune it for crater mapping, volcanic feature detection and ice estimation using small amounts of labeled data.

## Sources

- [Phys.org](https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-years-lunar-ice-craters.html)

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