As NASA prepared for Artemis II, the agency’s first crewed mission around the moon in more than half a century, teams across the organization generated streams of information – safety analyses, engineering reviews and mission data scattered across at least 10 separate sources.

“We have so much open data, and it can sometimes be hard to find. It can be hard to connect to it,” says Anna Steers-Smith, the agency’s senior advisor on AI.

NASA is increasingly turning to AI to extract insights from decades of observations, simulations and mission data.

Employees use AI tools including Microsoft Copilot to sift through massive amounts of academic literature and streamline daily tasks, while specialized systems such as Earth Copilot and Hydrology Copilot have helped researchers navigate complex Earth science datasets. AI also helped inform planning decisions for the recent Artemis II mission and is being considered for one of NASA’s most critical and demanding environments: Mission Control.

At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, teams are exploring how AI could help flight controllers sift through the massive amounts of information that inform space flights. The center developed a prototype AI agent designed to help SPARTAN flight controllers, who are responsible for the International Space Station’s power and thermal-control systems. The agent is designed to act as a virtual member of Mission Control’s support teams, whose specialists help flight controllers monitor spacecraft systems and make real-time decisions.
    

“We can foresee an AI agent being one of the backroom team members, where the front-room flight controller makes a call to the back room and gets an answer on the headset from his colleagues, or from his AI agent in this case,” says Troy LeBlanc, chief information officer for NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

The concept aims to address NASA’s growing challenge of managing and making sense of enormous amounts of mission data. LeBlanc says the agency confronted that reality while preparing for Artemis II, which generated a huge amount of information across multiple teams and systems.

“I was surprised at how much data we produced for a single mission that was only 10 days in duration,” he says. “That proves the impact of AI. Every mission we’re going to fly to the moon is going to produce similar or even larger amounts of data as we get toward a Moon Base. We’re going to need the tools to help bring all that data together.”

During planning for Artemis II, LeBlanc says, NASA used AI tools to generate safety recommendations and risk-mitigation scenarios to help leaders make decisions. Traditionally, it would take experts weeks to pull together information from various sources and analyze data to assess risks and spacecraft readiness.   

“The AI tools did that work in seconds – I mean, literally seconds,” LeBlanc says.

Sujay Kumar, assistant lab chief of NASA’s Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, says NASA’s vast stores of satellite, observational and modeling data make it uniquely positioned to benefit from AI.   

“It’s impossible for humans to really explore the true full potential of these datasets,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of fantastic missions and collected a ton of data. And I would say a good portion of it is still unexplored.

“That’s where some of these tools, particularly AI, for discovering patterns and new knowledge and understanding, can help,” Kumar says. “I see a lot of different applications all across NASA, everything from missions to science and using data for real-life applications.

“I’m excited about it, and I see that excitement here. It is a paradigm change.”   

‘Extracting more science’   

NASA has used forms of AI and machine learning for decades, from helping Mars rovers navigate autonomously to identifying anomalies in spacecraft systems. But the advent of large language models and AI systems capable of interacting with information in new ways has extended AI use beyond the small group of specialists who traditionally worked with it, Steers-Smith says.

“AI is not our mission,” she says. “We’re an exploration discovery agency. We use AI as one of our tools to find these opportunities or advance them. We are extracting more science from the data we already have by using AI.”

One of the biggest opportunities for NASA, she says, is helping scientists at NASA and beyond explore data that is not broadly accessible. To address that challenge, NASA collaborated with Microsoft to develop Earth Copilot and Hydrology Copilot, AI-powered tools designed to help users interact with complex data through natural language.   

Kumar’s team worked closely with Microsoft engineers to create Hydrology Copilot, which lets users ask questions about water data to better understand water-related issues. The tool can analyze variables such as precipitation and soil moisture to help communities prepare for droughts and anticipate flood risks. It automatically performs calculations and analyses that would otherwise require time-consuming manual work.

The goal is to provide access to information that once required significant expertise – a farmer, for example, can ask Hydrology Copilot what the environmental conditions were that year in a particular area. Local agencies can explore water conditions in their areas without needing technical expertise.

“I truly think this is going to democratize (data),” Kumar says. “It goes beyond scientists and practitioners who know how to work with the data to the average person who can just access the data and the information that flows from it.”

AI is also transforming weather forecasting, Kumar says. NASA foundational models trained on decades of Earth science data and physical models can help detect and simulate weather patterns quicker. AI is also enabling faster responses to disasters by allowing satellite data to be processed on the edge, close to where it’s created or used, instead of needing to transmit it back to Earth first.   

“Let’s say we are looking at the Earth and there’s a flood happening. By the time you beam the data down to Earth and we process it, it’s probably too late,” Kumar says. “If you’re able to process the flood map on the edge and give you that information directly, that’s a matter of minutes. And that makes a huge impact.”    

‘The possibilities are just endless’   

NASA’s growing interest in AI was on display during its first agencywide data and AI hackathon last year. Steers-Smith was advised to expect around 30 participants. More than 500 employees signed up.

Among the winning projects was a system of AI agents that uses a chat interface to let users search NASA’s extensive “lessons learned” public database, which holds knowledge from decades of missions and programs. Another used machine learning models to develop a solution for diagnosing the severity of forest fires to better protect firefighters and equipment.    

Steers-Smith says the hackathon highlighted a growing interest among NASA employees in using AI in their daily work. “If you used AI to solve somebody else’s problem, maybe you’re better now at critically thinking about how AI works with the problem you have,” she says. “I think it’s an evolution of AI and where people are finding value in it.”

For Steers-Smith, efforts like the hackathon underscore the value of AI to connect information spread across NASA’s many data repositories. Future endeavors such as building the Moon Base, she points out, will require scientists and engineers to gather information from a large array of sources on factors ranging from seismic activity to solar conditions and ice deposits.

“We collect so much data. We have new data, old data, satellite data, images, video, audio recordings. And it’s very, very hard to catalog all of that and connect it,” she says.

“If we can use AI to start connecting those things, we’ll make so much more discovery. The possibilities are just endless.”

Header image: The Artemis II crew captured the Moon with a distant Earth setting in the background during the lunar flyby in April 2026. Image credit: NASA 

Second and third image from top: A brilliant concentration of stars takes center stage in this image captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. NASA’s Perseverance rover took a self-portrait against a rocky outcrop on Mars’ western frontier. Image credit: NASA 

Fourth image: NASA’s Space Launch System rocket launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis II mission in April 2026. Image credit: NASA 

Story published on Sept 28, 2026

Deborah Bach writes about AI, innovation and the transformative ways organizations and people are using technology. A native of British Columbia, Deborah was previously a newspaper reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Baltimore Sun. Her work has been published in outlets including the New York Times, Vancouver Sun and TODAY.com, among others. You can reach Deborah on LinkedIn.