Monitoring the surface of the sun with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory

At NASA, data is everything. From object detection to mission enablement, data collection and rapid insight are paramount to mission success. And the challenge with analyzing the data is not just due to its size, but its type. The data is quite literally out of this world, including images of galaxies, stars, and planet surfaces from across the solar system. As NASA and its contractors look for faster and more reliable ways to collect and analyze data, they are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as the answer.

Nasa and AI

Based on the amount of data collected for any given NASA mission or project, it’s no surprise that AI is an enabling technology. AI is primarily used today to help with the detection of “things” and model enhancement. At NASA, AI is leveraged to monitor regions of space and automatically detect if something interesting just happened or is going to happen. Based on collected data and scientific models that describe a physical process, AI can be exploited to make scientific models more robust and reliable by enabling wider parameter exploration.

NASA is just scratching the surface in its use of AI for mission enhancement and enablement. The amount of data collected on a spacecraft to finetune humanity’s understanding of solar physics and derived models is massive, amounting to tens, if not hundreds of TBs per day. In fact, it’s impossible to analyze all of this data simply due to its size and the limited computing capabilities on a spacecraft hundreds of miles away, all but forcing NASA to prioritize sending certain types of telemetry data down to earth, which vary depending on the mission. This presents opportunities for AI to be utilized on board satellites, rovers, planes, or balloons.

The bigger truth

As data sets continue to grow and data movement further restricts the timeliness of results, the scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center studying the surface of the sun were at an impasse. They could accept the time it took to leverage a cloud computing cluster and deal with constant delays in moving data in and out of systems or look for an alternative. The Z by HP workstation proved to be the solution, providing a powerful technical foundation to enable better, faster, and interactive data analysis more collaboratively on growing data sets. As NASA continues to turn to AI to help transform how they analyze otherworldly data, it’s a good bet that HP’s Z8 workstation with NVIDIA GPUs will be there delivering the performance, flexibility, and reliability required to continue exploring the next frontier.

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