Google's Gemma 3 Runs in Orbit Aboard YAM-9 — AI Now Analyzes Earth From Space
Summary: Loft Orbital's YAM-9 satellite executed Google's Gemma 3 vision-language model in orbit in April 2026, processing Earth imagery on-board — the first publicly confirmed in-space VLM deployment.
Key Facts
- YAM-9 launched November 2025 on a SpaceX Transporter-15 rideshare, powered by an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX GPU
- Three components were integrated: Google DeepMind's open-weight Gemma 3, NASA JPL's NAVI-Orbital software harness, and LangGraph as the agent orchestration framework
- The satellite answered natural-language queries (e.g., "detect infrastructure around railway hubs") and returned classified summaries — no raw imagery was transmitted to the ground
- Loft Orbital estimates 50–100 comparable satellites would be needed for continuous global coverage
Why It Matters
Closing the inference loop on-orbit simultaneously addresses bandwidth constraints, latency, and data sensitivity. With commercially verified on-board AI inference, real-time Earth observation for defense, disaster response, and climate monitoring moves meaningfully closer to reality.
Read More
- TechCrunch — TechCrunch
- TechTimes — TechTimes