NASA’s AI Earth Copilot will take your questions about our planet

NASA is teaming up with Microsoft to create an AI chatbot designed to make it easier to access and understand scientific data about the Earth. The tool, called Earth Copilot, will be able to answer questions about our planet by condensing NASA’s wide swath of geospatial information into easy-to-digest responses.

To create the tool, NASA is integrating AI into its data repository, allowing Earth Copilot to refer to this information when answering questions, such as “What was the impact of Hurricane Ian in Sanibel Island?” or “How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect air quality in the US?”

NASA aims to “democratize” access to scientific data with the launch of Earth Copilot, as obtaining and understanding the information within NASA’s database is currently more difficult for people who aren’t researchers or scientists.

“For many, finding and extracting insights requires navigating technical interfaces, understanding data formats and mastering the intricacies of geospatial analysis — specialized skills that very few non-technical users possess,” Tyler Bryson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of health and public sector industries, said in the announcement. “AI could streamline this process, reducing time to gain insights from Earth’s data to a matter of seconds.

Right now, Earth Copilot is only available to NASA scientists and researchers, who will assess the tool’s capabilities. They’ll then explore its integration into NASA’s Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis (VEDA) platform, which already offers access to some of the agency’s data.