Auroras are beautiful sights on Earth, but the solar activity that causes them can wreaking havoc in space-based infrastructure like satellites. Using artificial intelligence to predict these destructive solar events has been the focus of KX's work with FDL.
Credit: Sebastian Saarloos
In the summer of 2024, North Americans were surprised when the Aurora lighted the night sky across their homeland, but the same solar activity that makes the Aurora can disrupt satellites, essential to systems on Earth. Solutions that predict these solar events and alert satellite operators may come through artificial intelligence.
Frontier Development Lab in Mountain View, California is an ongoing partnership between NASA and commercial AI companies, applying institutional learning to agents and beyond. Since 2016, Frontier Development Lab has applied AI on behalf of NASA in planetary defense, Heliophysics, Earth science, medicine, and lunar exploration.
Through collaboration with a company called KX Systems, Frontier Development Lab has now used innovative new software. method. The company's flagship data analytics software, called KDB+, is usually used in the financial industry to track rapid changes in market trends, but the company was investigating its use in space.
Between 2017 and 2019, KX Systems joined the Frontier Development Lab partnership through NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. Working with NASA scientists, KX applied the KDB+ capabilities to search for diplomatic spheres and predict areas that could be improved with AI models. One question the Frontier Development Lab tried to answer was whether KDB+ could create Auroras to predict the kind of spatial weather that predicts when GPS satellites will experience solar signal disruptions.
By importing several datasets that monitor ionosphere, solar activity, and Earth's magnetic fields and applying machine learning algorithms, researchers at the Frontier Development Lab were able to predict destructive events up to 24 hours ago.
Although this was a scientific application for AI, KX Systems says that some of this development work has brought it back to commercial products as there are similarities between AI models developed to find patterns of satellite signal loss and those predicting maintenance needs of industrial manufacturing equipment.
FD Technology PLC KX was launched in 1993, but the AI-driven business has grown considerably, and the company is doing the work it has done at NASA to accelerate some of its capabilities.
From protecting valuable satellites to keeping your production line running at top performance, it combines NASA's expertise with commercial ingenuity to help you succeed.
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