A team of scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has published the SatVision Top-of-Atmosphere Foundation Model for remote sensing. NASA said Wednesday that the geospatial foundation model can support the 3D cloud reconstruction and modeling for Earth and climate science studies. 

NASA Scientists Develop SatVision TOA

The foundational model is trained using 100 million images from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, an instrument on the Terra and Aqua satellites. Terra and Aqua orbit the Earth from north to south across the equator in the morning and south to north across the equator in the afternoon, respectively, to capture images of the planet’s surface. The MODIS instruments collect data in 36 spectral bands in three different resolutions to enable scientists to better understand environmental processes around the world. 

According to NASA, the team used “all-sky” conditions during the SatVision TOA’s pre-training period, which enabled the 3D cloud reconstruction and cloud modeling capability. Similar foundation models that currently exist are trained solely on cloud-free satellite imagery, which presents limitations and often requires atmospheric corrections. 

The GSFC Data Science Group behind the foundational model believes that their work can advance atmospheric science, cloud structure analysis and Earth system modeling. 

The SatVision TOA model architecture is available via GitHub while the model weights are on Hugging Face. 

The Office of Management and Budget has started soliciting input on methods the federal government can implement to strengthen the resilience of domestic semiconductor manufacturing and maintain this capability through the acquisition of commercial IT end products, including chips produced in the U.S.

OMB said Tuesday that through the request for information, the current administration intends to understand how the federal acquisition system can best leverage domestic chip sources to ensure a secure supply chain for commercial IT products and services purchased by the U.S. government.

The agency is soliciting feedback on potential procurement approaches to mitigate supply chain disruption and increase chip production in the U.S.

The government seeks to determine ways to incentivize government contractors to scale up their use of semiconductors produced in the U.S.

According to the RFI, market segments of interest include telecommunication infrastructure and services, cloud and data center infrastructure and services, transportation and vehicles, and ICT devices such as mobile phones and laptops.

Questions for Stakeholders 

OMB is asking stakeholders how quickly they could start using domestically produced semiconductors given the existence of sufficient economic incentives and how much production is needed to constitute a sufficient domestic chip supply.

The RFI also includes questions pertaining to domestic supply chain vulnerabilities surrounding semiconductors, the anticipated timeline for domestic production, factors that cause significant delays in bringing domestic manufacturing facilities online and the types of innovations that could help improve the efficiency of the manufacturing market.

The agency also asked about actions the federal government should take to promote strong small business participation by resellers offering commercial IT with domestically produced semiconductors.

Government Initiatives to Strengthen Domestic Chip Supply

According to OMB, the RFI follows a series of measures the government has initiated to enable an essential supply of domestically fabricated semiconductors.

Such actions include the Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Incentives Program, the Department of Defense’s Microelectronics Commons initiative and the Tech Hubs program.