NASA JPL, Ubotica and Open Cosmos collaboration

Ubotica Technologies and Open Cosmos have announced an agreement with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to collaborate on the Flight Demonstration of Federated Autonomous MEasurement (FAME), under the Advanced Information Systems Technology programme in NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office.

FAME aims to link more than 50 spacecraft from a wide range of operators in the largest autonomous satellite operations test ever attempted, demonstrating a fundamentally new way to observe Earth.

Ubotica’s SPACE:AI platform and two Open Cosmos spacecraft, the currently operational Hammer and Accenture-1, are named as AI satellite assets in the programme.

From observing to knowing and acting

Today’s Earth observation satellites – optical, radar, infrared – collect vast amounts of data across multiple modalities and return it to the ground for human analysts to interpret hours or days later. While the satellites have powerful instruments, they have no understanding of what they are seeing.

FAME builds on a new generation of satellites that do understand the data they are collecting. When Ubotica’s onboard AI processes data in orbit and detects an event of interest, such as ships at sea that have switched off their tracking systems, a wildfire, or a volcanic eruption, it acts immediately: takes a closer look, generates an alert, tasks a follow-on spacecraft. No analyst in the middle. No ground station delay.

FAME federates that capability across an entire constellation. One satellite sees something. The network of satellites responds. Follow-on spacecraft reorient and acquire targeted observations within minutes. The loop closes autonomously, replacing passive data collection with active, autonomous, federated intelligence across a constellation that can coordinate as an intelligent system.

The multiyear flight demonstration of FAME is expected to begin with an initial set of six spacecraft in summer 2026.

Built on two Space AI breakthroughs

FAME builds on two innovations demonstrated in orbit for the first time aboard Hammer.

The first: real-time identification. Ubotica’s SPACE:AI platform processes imagery onboard, identifying events of interest in seconds rather than waiting for ground-based analysis.

The second: autonomous action through Dynamic Targeting, a technology developed by NASA JPL and first successfully demonstrated in orbit by NASA JPL, Ubotica and Open Cosmos in July 2025. It autonomously reorients the spacecraft and captures high-resolution confirmation imagery in just over 60 seconds, with no ground station involvement.

Together, these two capabilities produce more valuable data, and the insights are available much quicker than with a conventional pass.

FAME is the next stage: taking these proven single-satellite capabilities and making them work across a federated constellation.

Fintan Buckley, CEO at Ubotica said: “Dynamic Targeting showed what a single satellite with onboard AI can achieve. FAME shows what happens when that capability is coordinated across a network. Our contribution is the intelligence inside the Ubotica nodes: detecting what matters, processing it in orbit, and passing the signal to whatever asset can act on it fastest. That is how you close the loop at a speed that is actually useful.”

Rafel Jordá Siquier, CEO of Open Cosmos said: “When Open Cosmos builds and designs satellites, we always have two key goals in mind: to understand and connect the world. Understanding the world requires a layer of context that is accessible in real-time, so that data can be acted upon without delay. By adding the scale of a full network to this capability, FAME opens a new realm of possibility for what Earth observation technology can achieve.”

Programme timeline

Year one focuses on maturing flight capabilities and executing initial onboard AI and rapid notification tests across the core constellation. Years two and three scale to the full 50+ spacecraft network, processing thousands of automated alerts and executing hundreds of autonomous on-orbit tasking commands across assets from multiple operators and agencies.

Operational context

The SPACE:AI platform is already in operational deployment in Ubotica’s Live Maritime Intelligence service, providing predictive maritime domain awareness across European waters. The same onboard AI that detects dark vessels and monitors critical underwater infrastructure powers Ubotica’s contribution to FAME.

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