FAME’s multi-year flight demonstration is expected to begin with the first set of six spacecraft this summer.
Irish space-tech startup Ubotica will provide its in-house AI systems in partnership with NASA in a campaign to demonstrate autonomous intelligent satellite networks.
The ‘flight demonstration of federated autonomous measurement’ (FAME) campaign is being run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and will see the participation of UK satellite provider Open Cosmos.
FAME aims to observe Earth by connecting “more than 50 spacecraft from various operators in the largest independent satellite experiment ever attempted”, according to three participants.
The mission will use satellites equipped with Ubotica’s onboard AI to monitor, identify and ‘understand’ Earth events such as wildfires, rogue ships or volcanic activity in real time and “act quickly in orbit, capture additional data and trigger subsequent observations without waiting for Earth analysis”.
According to Ubotica, traditional satellites for earth observation, radar and infrared capture and send data to their operators for “delayed processing”, while its AI platform “allows satellites to think, see and act autonomously, processing images in orbit in real time, extracting information using advanced AI models and quickly transmitting important intelligence to Earth”.
FAME aims to demonstrate the replication of that capability “throughout the constellation”, so that observations, interpretations by AI and subsequent related behavior of one satellite are interpreted by others in the network, which may adjust their subsequent behavior accordingly in parallel as a “smart program”.
The basis of FAME is in the previous collaboration between the three, who in July 2025, successfully demonstrated ‘flexible steering’, which allows the spacecraft to reorient itself when needed – without the involvement of the ground crew – to capture images to confirm the event.
Ubotica CEO Fintan Buckley said: “Dynamic targeting has shown that only one satellite with on-board AI can achieve this.
“Our contribution is the intelligence inside the Ubotica nodes: finding what’s important, processing it in orbit and transmitting the signal to any asset that can act on it very quickly. That’s how you close the loop at a really useful speed.”
FAME’s multi-year flight demonstration is expected to begin with the first set of six spacecraft this summer. The collaborative work on adaptive guidance was recognized in December with the SpaceNews Icon Award for the Space AI Partnership.
The trio said the first year of the mission will focus on maturing the flight’s capabilities and conducting AI tests and alerts across the constellation, while years two and three will see a ramp up to a network of more than 50 spacecraft “processing thousands of automated alerts and executing hundreds of automated rotating commands” from multiple cargo agencies and institutions.
Dublin-based Ubotica was founded in 2016 by Buckley, John Bourke and Aubrey Dunne. In February, the company was among the first to be selected to participate in the European Space Agency Phi-Lab at Irish Manufacturing Research in Mullingar, Co Westmeath.
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