Aussie dish serves up second helping for moon mission

inkl.com Apr 2, 2026

Aussie dish serves up second helping for moon mission

Curated by Shubham · TechCapsules · Apr 2, 2026

AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication

A South Australian telemetry dish, operated by Southern Launch, is tracking NASA's Orion spacecraft during its 10-day mission around the moon as part of the Artemis II mission. This marks Australia's second significant contribution to a lunar mission, following its role in the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. The dish uses a Doppler signal to calculate the spacecraft's speed, providing crucial information for the mission.

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Satellite AI Inference Clears Orbit: Gemma 3 Ran Aboard YAM-9 in April

Loft Orbital's YAM-9 spacecraft successfully demonstrated the first publicly disclosed execution of a vision-language model in orbit. Aboard the spacecraft, Google DeepMind's Gemma 3 performed natural language queries, classified Earth imagery, and produced plain-English summaries without transmitting raw pixels to the ground. This achievement marks a significant shift in the value layer of Earth observation, moving from ground-based processing to onboard inference capabilities. The model, running on an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX graphics processing unit, utilized a software harness developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to fit within the spacecraft's memory budget and processing constraints.

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spacenews.com · Jun 17

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