Sophia Space, a company based in Pasadena, has entered into a cooperative research and development agreement with MIT Lincoln Laboratory to study how computing performed in space could aid high-resolution weather-modeling research aimed at remote operating environments.
The partnership pairs the laboratory's background in weather-modeling research with Sophia Space's edge-compute concepts. Together, the organizations intend to examine whether distributed computing can deliver more timely environmental information for planning and decision-support uses.
Rob DeMillo, co-founder and chief executive of Sophia Space, described the agreement as evidence that space-based computing infrastructure should emerge from close cooperation between commercial firms and leading research institutions. "MIT Lincoln Laboratory brings unmatched weather sensing, forecasting and decision-support research expertise, and together we will explore the potential application of space-based computing to weather-modeling research," he said in a statement.
Under the terms of the agreement, MIT Lincoln Laboratory will supply weather-modeling research expertise. That includes identifying modeling configurations, parameters and data sources to be evaluated. The team will also create representative test data and measure weather-model performance against defined research metrics, using frameworks that work with Sophia Space's initial hardware configurations.
Sophia Space, for its part, will furnish the AI-inference compute environment used to evaluate representative weather-model workloads. The evaluation will cover both terrestrial setups and potential space-based computing configurations.
Beyond the immediate testing, the two organizations plan to explore high-level system and service architectures. That work could shape future research into applications of computing based in space.
The companies and the laboratory are also engaged in related work under Department of the Air Force STTR Topic SF25D-T1201, through the SpaceWERX Futures Series: Adaptive and Intelligent Space Challenge. That parallel effort looks at technologies tied to autonomous, resilient and networked space-system operations.
Dr. Timothy Bonin, assistant group leader of the Air Traffic Control & Weather Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, pointed to the practical stakes of the research. "Timely weather information is critical for operations in remote and contested environments," he said in a statement, noting that the collaboration will test how space-based computing might process satellite observations and other environmental data closer to where it is collected.
Bonin added that the effort will also assess what the approach could mean for communications demands and the timelines involved in delivering information to users. Information for this story was provided by Sophia Space Inc.
