Ground Control #3: Space and the A.I. Revolution

Arnt-Børre Salberg is the guest at 17:00-20:00, Mesh Youngstorget, Møllergata 6, Oslo. He and his team have built THOR since he gave a talk on artificial intelligence and Earth observation from space at Spaceport Norway in 2017. The Norwegian Computing Center was already well ahead in this research — but the field barely had an established name, and few outside the lab had begun to understand what was coming. That talk set in motion a collaboration with ESA that is still running today.

Eight years later, THOR is a foundation model for Earth observation that the Norwegian Space Agency describes as setting the standard within ESA. Trained on 22 terabytes of satellite data from four different Sentinel sensors, built on one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, and released as fully open source. The Norwegian Computing Center won the ESA tender in open competition against larger European players.

Where traditional AI required a separate model for every task — one for sea ice, another for flood mapping, another for snow cover — THOR works as a shared platform that can be rapidly adapted to new problems with far less data and computing power. It maps icebergs, wetlands, oil spills and vegetation. It enables near-real-time environmental monitoring. And it is available to anyone with basic Python skills and an interest in what satellites can see.