ICYMI ET&I Keynote Dr. Troy LeBlanc

In case you missed it, this is ACT-IAC’s Emerging Tech and Innovation conference keynote remarks from NASA Johnson Space Center CIO Dr. Troy LeBlanc. He outlines how 65 years of human spaceflight have produced an explosion of imagery and mission data, from priceless Apollo film archives to near real-time ISS downlinks and millions of photos per expedition. He explains the need to organize, secure, and rapidly process data for confident, safe decisions, while preserving public trust as AI makes altered images harder to detect. LeBlanc describes NASA’s approach to image provenance through policy and C2PA standards, plus AI to accelerate cataloging, metadata tagging, and near real-time downlink analysis to flag issues or restrictions.

Agile Product Discovery Course | ACT-IAC

Summary - A Hole in One with ACT-IAC

Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to never miss an episode! For more from ACT-IAC, follow us on LinkedIn or visit http://www.actiac.org.

Learn more about membership at https://www.actiac.org/join.
Donate to ACT-IAC at https://actiac.org/donate.
 
Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound

(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)

Transcript

HOST: [00:00:00] Welcome back to The Buzz with ACT-IAC, where government and industry leaders discuss the ideas, innovations, and people shaping the future of the public sector. A few weeks ago, ACT-IAC hosted our Emerging Tech and Innovation Conference, and we were honored to have NASA Johnson Space Center CIO Dr. Troy LeBlanc as our keynote speaker.
HOST: He describes how human spaceflight has created an explosion of imagery and mission data from historic film archives to near real-time ISS downlinks. In case you missed it, here it is. 
KENNETH PLUMMER: Well, good morning, everyone. Good morning. Well, thank you. Thank you. The show, the show is about to begin after I get off the stage, so y- you've come to see, um, the person that I'm gonna be introducing.
KENNETH PLUMMER: So it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Troy LeBlanc, [00:01:00] the chief information officer at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Dr. LeBlanc holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, along with both a Master's of Science and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Houston, with a concentration in high-performance computing Dr.
KENNETH PLUMMER: LeBlanc was appointed CIO in June of twenty twenty-three. He brings over thirty-four years of experience supporting human space flight at NASA. In his current role, he leads the delivery of critical IT solutions and safeguarding the vital data that underpins NASA's human space flight programs. He has also served as a special advisor to the Nash- NASA Associate Administer- [00:02:00] Administrator of the Space Operations Mission Directorate, where he provided strategic guidance on Moon and Mars deep space communications and networks for NASA's futu- future missions.
KENNETH PLUMMER: From twenty fifteen to twenty nineteen, Dr. LeBlanc served as Chief of Mission s- Systems Division within the Flight Operations Directorate, where he led all IT development for the Mission Control Center. Earlier in his career, he worked as, extensively as both a NASA engineer and flight controller, contributing directly to mission operations for space shuttle and space station missions.
KENNETH PLUMMER: So this, I think, is very important. He also spent three years in the private sector with Intuitive Machines, serving as the President of Ground [00:03:00] Segment, Segment for the company's commercial lunar payload services missions. Throughout his NASA career, Dr. LeBlanc has recog- was recognized with numerous honors, including the Exceptional Service Medal, the Excep- Exceptional Achievement Medal, and the prestig- prestigious Silver Snoopy Award, given to the astron-- g- given by the Astronaut Corps.
KENNETH PLUMMER: In his, in his spare time, he enjoys the privileges of being a pilot. We just had many conversations about how, uh, how he enjoys that, um, having had the opportunity to fly a NASA T-38 and the famous Super Guppy We're delighted to have Dr. LeBlanc with us today to provide an overview of how AI will impact NASA's mission's imagery and other human space flight [00:04:00] operations.
KENNETH PLUMMER: Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lu- Dr. Troy LeBlanc
DR. TROY LEBLANC: All right. Thank you, Ken, for that introduction. So it's my pleasure to speak with you all today. So my, my speech is about data. So Houston, we have a data problem. Every time that you open your camera app on your cell phone to take a picture, you're creating a file. And in that one photo, there is probably more data attached to it than all of the telemetry commands and crew health data that was com-- all combined that was generated during the landing of the Apollo 11.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: My teams tried to calculate that for me. [00:05:00] In sixty-five years of human space flight, the leaps that the world has made in technology have led to an explosion of data that we're able to collect. At NASA, we treat data like gold because with more data, we have more opportunities to further space exploration and learn about the world around us.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: There's opportunity now, and not just for us to return to the surface of the moon, but when we do return to ensure that we're there to stay So however, with, with this immense volume of information, there's also a demand to organize the data, to manage access to the data, establish confidentiality, and find ways to quickly process all the data that we collect so that we can make decisions for human spaceflight more confidently [00:06:00] With so much information available, it's easy to build up backlogs or bury important details that could be critical to making safe decisions for human space flight.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And that's the challenge that we face today, and it's a problem that we're going to solve with emerging technology. So good morning, everybody. My name's Troy LeBlanc. Like Ken said, I'm the Chief Information Officer at NASA's Johnson Space Center down in Houston. It's my job to provide mission support for the missions, uh, through IT services.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: I have multiple teams who work for me, one of which is our mission imagery team. They are responsible for downlinking and managing all the photos and videos that you all see for human space flight missions. My partner-- my, my teams partner with the human space flight programs and the directorates at the Johnson Space Center and across the [00:07:00] agency to provide secure IT for NASA's missions to achieve our goals in research, discovery and exploration Uh, you see there on the, on the screen a aerial view of the Johnson Space Center down in Houston.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: A bit more about JSC, um, our mission is human space flight. Our teams just completed the Artemis II mission, and you can see there's another slide coming. There it is. So that's a picture of the s- space launch system with the Orion spacecraft and our four crew members on board. Uh, a little, um, I, uh, tidbit of data for you guys, Kennedy Space Center launches the missions, and they have to do all the pre-processing to launch.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: As soon as that rocket clears the tower, Houston's controlling, and you may hear that on the audio if you listen to the launches in real time. Uh, we've also been flying the International Space Station for twenty-seven years, twenty-five of which now have [00:08:00] been with, uh, continuous human presence on board.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And there you see a beautiful picture of the space station in orbit. This picture was taken from the space shuttle, um, Endeavor, I'm pretty sure, uh, during a fly-around of the spacecraft right after we finished what we called assembly complete. So this was the final configuration that the space station has been in now then since twenty eleven.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We're also the home to Mission Control. So you see a picture of Mission Control here with a dedication sign on the side to Christopher Kraft. He is the gentleman credited with, uh, coming up with the idea of we need a mission control function on the ground to support when we have astronauts flying spacecraft in space.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: I got to meet him actually as a young man. It was, uh, uh, one of those awe- you know, awe moments for me to meet, uh, such a famous aerospace community team member. And it's, you know, besides mission control, it essentially makes it essentially [00:09:00] our job to support our astronauts flying in space. And so here you have a picture coming up of, uh, you probably all saw in the news, of the Artemis II crew when they came back to the recovery ship, when they landed in the Pacific Ocean, sitting on the edge of the helicopter as they were waiting to be escorted to, uh, get their first, you know, medical checks after they landed after ten days in space.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We have a saying at the Johnson Space Center: dare, unite, explore. We dare to expand frontiers, pushing boundaries with human spaceflight technology. We're looking for ways always to use emerging technology, which is what this conference is all about. We unite with our partners to compete, to complete bold missions, and we explore space for the benefit of humanity.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Everything we do with technology at the Johnson Space Center is driven by our mission to support humans in space. For over sixty years, the Johnson Space Center [00:10:00] has led human spaceflight. The images you're about to see on screen are official NASA photos from all of our human spaceflight programs throughout our history.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So first, the Mercury missions, ensuring humans could actually function in space. And each time I show you a photo, what I'm gonna tell you is it's my offi- our official NASA photos that my team maintains a collection of. So that is the official photo of the famous Mercury Seven, right? That you've probably seen in, in newsreels and media before.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Uh, to the Gemini missions next, which tested out our capabilities to dock with other spacecraft and conduct spacewalks. This is a official photo of Ed White, one of our cl- class two astronauts, um, doing the first American spacewalk. To our historic Apollo missions on the Moon. Here's a really awesome photo of John Young, [00:11:00] Apollo 16.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Um, he's actually doing a vertical leap, and the way we know that is because you don't see a shadow attached to his feet, of hi- of him, right? He did a vertical leap with a two hundred and fifty-pound spacesuit, which do- which is only one-sixth that weight on the Moon, and about a four-foot vertical leap.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And Charlie Duke took a picture of him at the apex of his leap, and they published that photo, and I've seen that photo in, in many places besides NASA, uh, locations. People love that one. Next, we were preparing for and conducting the Apollo-Soyuz test project with the Soviet Union back in the '70s. Here you see a photo of, uh, a U.S.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: crew member and a Soviet crew member working together in a simulator, uh, preparing for that mission. And then on to Skylab. We had three Skylab missions. Skylab was really our first space station. Um, you see the three, uh, Skylab III crew [00:12:00] members in an Apollo simulator in Houston practicing before their mission, preparing to go to space.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And then on to the space shuttle program. Uh, this is a picture of, I think it's Endeavor. It's got a Mini Payload Logistics Module in the payload bay you see in the rear. Um, that's a component provided by the European Space Agency to provide logistics that would go to the space station when we were doing the outfitting and, and preparing the space station to become a national laboratory.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And then in operation today, like I said a little while ago, the International Space Station. And here is a picture of one of our astronauts, Peggy Whitson. Peggy, um, highly flown astronaut, almost seven hundred days in space. We had a, um, a gala event in Houston we have every year, and, um, we award the National Space Trophy at that event.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And [00:13:00] Peggy was the awardee this year for that tr- for that trophy. That's why I thought I'd bring this photo today of her in what's called the cupola. Has seven windows that look down upon the Earth, and she almost came to tears. Uh, they had a picture similar to that at the event. And you know, you know, having been there many times and done what she does, it still brought her nearly to tears to talk about her experiences in space and being able to see the Earth through those windows.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And then finally, we have the exciting start to our Artemis program that we all witnessed last month, and I'm sure you've all seen this photo. This is one of our official photos. Uh, we had a camera on the tip of a solar array that could see the spacecraft and in this case, um, the fast-approaching moon.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And these were the first images we got that were getting closer and closer to the-- see the, the detailed features of the moon. So NASA's imagery has evolved dramatically over the years, from film and tapes returned by hand to now near real-time digital downlink. Here's a picture of an [00:14:00] astronaut, Don Pettit.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Don is, um, one of our most prolific photographers in space. You can see in that picture, he's got probably fifteen cameras floating around him in the s- in the space station. Um, he, he takes a lot of photos when he's up there. That was Expedition thirty-one he was on. He was recently on Expedition seventy-two as well.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: In fact, he turned seventy years old in space, uh, so probably almost, almost one of our oldest astronauts. We allowed, uh, John Glenn to fly again, and he was a little, a little bit older than, uh, Don there. But, um- The sheer volume of data that NASA has to work with is staggering. To try to put this in perspective, when a new crew of astronauts goes to the space station, we call that an expedition.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: A typical expedition will last about six months, and we're currently on Expedition seventy-four. In the first five years of the International Space Station program, we produced about one million photographs. [00:15:00] That might sound like a lot, but this has been exponentially increasing over the years because of advancements in camera technology and because of crew interest in taking photos.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So today, we get about one million photos per expedition. The next slide you see right here is the one millionth photo taken during, during Expedition seventy-two by astronaut Nicole Ayers. And like I said, Don Pettit was on that mission with her, but she took a photo of-- What you're seeing here is the Florida Straits and Cuba, uh, mostly under, under some cloud cover there.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: But, uh, she gets credit for taking the one millionth photo of that expedition. In total, the-- for the entirety of the space station program, we've taken about ten point three million still photos. So you can consider that volume of photos, but then factor in that's only the still imagery. It doesn't take into account video.[00:16:00] 
DR. TROY LEBLANC: The amount of physical film that NASA has is incredible. Uh, here's a photo. I asked my team to take a photo of me in front of-- We have a, um, a freezer that we keep in-- at the Johnson Space Center, and the case you're seeing there, and the inset shows it, um, it's a little hard to read, but inside that case are the film canisters for Apollo eight, nine, ten, and eleven.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So this is the actual film that went to the surface of the Moon, so it's a priceless asset, you know, for the United States. So we, we pulled it out of the edge of the freezer so that I could take a knee next to it and take a picture with it, so you all could see that today. We have more than twelve million feet of, of physical film for human space flight.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And twelve million feet roughly equates to the distance from New York to Los Angeles. That's the physical film, and when you [00:17:00] consider that even while I've been speaking, we have eight live downlink high-definition channels coming from the space station every minute of every day. 
GOOGLE AD: The agentic era of public service is here.
GOOGLE AD: With Gemini for Government, move beyond AI exploration to real-world applications and agents at scale, driving mission impact now. Twenty-five years ago, Google created the front door to the internet. Today, we're providing the front door to enterprise AI. From empowering employees to transforming workflows, these agents are helping accelerate mission outcomes, secure our nation, speed up scientific discovery, and make services more accessible.
GOOGLE AD: Discover the agentic transformation at publicsector.google/ai. 
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So of all that footage we capture, which a lot of it is Earth views and other, other, um, interesting, um, let's say, aspects of the Earth, uh, we really only consider about twenty percent of that, excuse me, um, permanent record, 'cause we [00:18:00] work very closely with the National Archives to make sure we are preserving all this history that we're producing every day with human space flight.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: On top of all of that, our imagery team in Houston produces all the video and photos for the live broadcasts and the live streams that happen during spacewalks. Here's a photo, um, of Jessica Meir. Uh, Jessica was on Space Station in twenty nineteen, and if you all recall, she did a, the first all-female spacewalk with Christina Koch.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And so that's Christina taking a picture of, of Jessica during their spacewalk. Interestingly, if you recall, Christina Koch was an Artemis II crew member as well, so she went to the Moon. Uh, and at right now, on Expedition seventy-four, Jessica Meir in this photo is the commander of Expedition seventy-four.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So she flew in twenty nineteen and is flying again right now. So they get to fly a lot and take a lot of [00:19:00] photos.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Our imagery team also supports press conferences. Here you see one of the many press conferences the Artemis II crew conducted. They take photos of tests. So here we have two engineers who are using some spacewalk equipment. Actually, it would be for terrestrial or planetary terrestrial spacewalk equipment.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So they're testing it in a rock yard that we have at the Johnson Space Center. So they're working with equipment to show the astronauts how they would use equipment when they're walking on the surface of the Moon, for example. And then there's also other signifiga-- every other significant event that happens on the ground for testing and, and other events, um, we record and, and process all that data.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: This includes the live streams that you've seen during the Artemis II missions. When the crew swung past the Moon during the lunar flyby last month, millions of people watched from home. And from the ground excuse me. [00:20:00] From the ground, we got to watch our astronauts name never-before-seen craters on the Moon's surface, and as the crew observed and photographed, uh, an eclipse.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: I think that's the next photo
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So this was a case where as the spacecraft proceeded towards the Moon from the Earth, the-- we were able to catch a, a glimpse of when the Moon was completely eclipsing the Sun. It's an awesome photo. We got to see the crew living together in close quarters, testing out deep space, how it influences the human body, both mentally and physically.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We got to hear daily updates from the crew as they posted to social media, including what songs they woke up to each morning, which is quite a difference actually from the pictures and video that we have from the Apollo missions, how much social media and our ability to bring that information to the public has changed the way [00:21:00] we tell you all about the space missions.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And then on splashdown day, millions more tuned in to watch our live coverage as the crew returned home safely after ten days in space. So, you know, our NASA imagery is by far the most effective way that NASA engages with the public, and NASA's reputation relies on the public's trust that we are not altering our imagery.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So what could happen in the age of AI? So you might have seen s- photos on social media from the Artemis 2 mission that people had altered. Some were obvious, like this picture of a live concert happening in a fictitious crater on the Moon Or this image of the crew on return, where you can see it's really not the crew, how different our commander Reid Wiseman's face looks in the [00:22:00] altered image on the left as opposed to the real images from our official photography
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Others were even more difficult to identify. Here's an image, uh, that-- of the Orion capsule that makes it look like there was excessive damage to the spacecraft on splashdown. But we know for many reasons, including our ph-official photography and a capsule inspection after the mission, both in the water and on the ship, uh, that the image on the left was altered.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: But how, how does the public know? So AI has impacted NASA's mission imagery in, in two ways. First, there's now a need to unequivocally prove image provenance, and that's a negative impact. We, we basically having to prove that our images truly are the real images. The second, though, is a tremendous opportunity to me.[00:23:00] 
DR. TROY LEBLANC: It's the ability to accelerate our workflows. We can speed up cataloging, tagging, and analysis of all the imagery that we bring down, which, as you've heard today, is increasing with every mission. So the potential positive side of AI impact is that it can help us organize and retrieve our data faster and make it more available to the public more quickly.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So what's our strategy to retain public trust? So first, we establish NASA policy. And right now we're, we're writing guidelines for the use of authentic human-created media versus AI-generated media. Part of that policy would be to implement what we call C2PA standards, uh, to trace image origins. We're working with camera manufacturers and imagery software providers to integrate credentials at capture so that the credentials are worked into the metadata as soon as the photographer clicks the button.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So one of our goals also is to reduce the effort of [00:24:00] cataloguing, cataloging our imagery to help make sure that the metadata is consistent. And after we've met all those requirements to prove image provenance, our next step would be to look at how AI can offer us some operational enhancements. For imagery acquisition, we're working with vendors to make sure the cameras we're using are equipped with what's becoming now s- industry standard AI on board the camera, which aids in shooting.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: The AI is applied to the camera, helps with high precision, sticky tracking, often placing focus boxes over the face and eyes of the subjects so that we can get, uh, you know, any type of, you know, human, animal, vehicle type subjects, uh, and ensure that the portraits are sharp, uh, even in low light. For imagery cataloging, in addition to the features we've used to establish provenance, we've also are looking at ways to use AI for image analysis to auto-populate and enhance [00:25:00] metadata for other NASA-specific needs.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: For instance, st- standard AI model right now would not probably recognize the picture you're seeing on the screen. This is the Canada arm. It's the robotic arm on the space station provided by the Canadian Space Agency. So since the standard AI model would not know that right off the bat, uh- we would populate that description in the metadata of the image by hand.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Our mission imagery team at the Johnson Space Center is creating a labeling nomenclature to be used with AI engines to automatically tag and add this detailed metadata to the image so that we don't have to do it manually by hand for both Space Station and the future Artemis missions. For imagery analysis, the imagery team is in the early stages of planning for the use of AI in the near real-time downlink analysis.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: This helps us quickly mark timestamps for significant [00:26:00] events, flag possible issues, or identify when an image should be restricted. This might happen in cases where a branded product floats across the screen, and you'll love this image because you all have seen it on the news
DR. TROY LEBLANC: There we go So Nutella got a lot out of that one, right? It also might help if, uh, we have, for example, pro- uh, proprietary music playing in the background when the video's on onboard. Or there may be moments captured that intrudes upon astronaut privacy. So we have to look at the imagery, make sure it's really, really ready for public consumption.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So how do we get all these incredible images that you guys get-- you all get to see with us? There's a lot that has to happen behind the scenes pre-mission. The massive amount of mission imagery produced during human spaceflight is only a portion of the data we create. The imagery for the Artemis and International Space Station [00:27:00] missions might make flying in space look routine or even easy, but in truth, these missions are very, very difficult.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Returning to the surface of the Moon will be a very difficult mission. Before every mission, there is so much mission planning and so much rigorous training that has to happen before we get to see the awesome pictures I've been showing you today. Our teams assess hazard reports and risk analyses, briefing packages, abort procedures, failure modes, launch commit criteria, and the list goes on and on, flight waivers.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We have this mountain of data we already produce for the missions in preparation for what we call flight readiness reviews. These happen at multiple levels of our agency, and all these reviews are meant to answer the question, the go, no-go question: Are we ready to fly safely? For Artemis II, that answer lived across at least ten different data domains, each with its own format, schema, and data owners.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And that amount of data to grapple with is difficult, whether you're a human or a computer. [00:28:00] So this is another place where AI as an emerging technology can come in to help us. For the past few years, we've been exploring AI just like everybody else to help us di-digest all these disparate datasets, help us answer that go, no-go call for our missions, right?
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And this is where we found what we call our Holy Grail. It's a project that my team conducted on behalf of the Safety and Mission Assurance Office for the Moon to Mars program. We called it Holy Grail mostly because we like cool project names, but, uh, also because it became the solution to the-- uh, to help us answer that very important go, no-go question.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So Holy Grail is an AI agent. It's a capability that we, uh, we use to cut across those ten disparate domains and have an AI agent prepare a risk-based recommendation on whether it's safe to fly to, to provide our safety engineers with that help. We had requirements that this tool would have to meet. We wanted to use natural [00:29:00] language inputs in response.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We needed to be a cloud-based federated credential system so we could work with our international and commercial partners. We needed to better re-read all those different kinds of data we talked about, the hazard reports, risk analysis, and so forth. We needed to have a multi-format corpus, meaning it could read Excel, PDFs, or whatever format, uh, people chose to produce data in, both structured and unstructured data.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We needed to have what we call data integrity reconciliation, the ability to resolve discrepancies in the data and generate figures and tables in near real time. And we want it to be easy enough to use on a daily basis throughout the whole mission. Uh, it should be something that they could quickly open, ask a plain language question of the system, and then get an answer within seconds.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We needed it also, obviously, to cite its sources so that we had authen-- authoritative data for reference. And finally, speed. As I mentioned before, we wanted the questions-- [00:30:00] These questions took weeks to answer historically for the mission preparation, but now these questions with this kind of tool are answerable in minutes.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So what made Holy Grail different is what we did not pre-build the schema for the data domains. The AI agent generated this unified ontology on its own in real time, reasoning across all ten datasets at that time. Rather than manually mapping the schema, the AI agent found the relationships across the domains and developed a summary of this data for the, uh, safety engineers when asked in real time.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So it doesn't actually answer a go or no-go question, but it gives all that data. It doesn't replace the judgment of those flight controllers. It changes what's possible for them. So the safety engineers could query the system in plain language. They could get access to the reference data, the flight rules, and other data sources, and surface fac-- risk factors that were maybe buried in tables or figures, and then have a briefing package generated and ready immediately with full [00:31:00] traceability, so they could pre-brief senior management on their answers for those go, no-go calls.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So where was that Holy Grail hidden? We actually built this agent in November of twenty twenty-five, about four or five months before the mission. We built it upon a platform called Luna. So several years ago, we identified one of those base requirements I mentioned, which was the ability to have a cloud-based federated credential system to work with our partners.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And that became the base requirement that said to us that Luna was the right place on which to build the Holy Grail system. Uh, we knew from our prior experience with Space Station that the Artemis missions would have a similar demand for, for working together in a common environment with our partners.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So it just happened in the middle of building Luna that AI plain language chat interfaces became available to all of us. So our safety and mission assurance team, when they asked us if they, we could build a system for them, we already knew where we would put the Holy Grail system in terms of [00:32:00] being in, uh, in the Luna platform.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: But Holy Grail is not the only tool that's in that platform. We also have an application in there for helping with AI, AI helping us with export control, which helps NASA get research and other content out for public use more quickly. We use it for simulations. So these are s- uh, virtualized experiences of the moon.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So what happened here was we have a picture coming up now where we took all the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data and made a simulated lunar surface in our, in our simulation ca- uh, system that's part of the Luna platform. And in this case, NASA was collaborating with JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Agency.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: Uh, they have been given the, uh, opportunity to build a pressurized rover for the Artemis program. And so what has gone on here is that we could partner through Luna with Japan and take their-- they could roll their simulated rover over our simulated lunar landscape, so that we could learn together, uh, what [00:33:00] needs to happen to evolve the, the s- let's say, the design of that rover.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So the ability to collaborate across nations and across industry with the Luna platform is allowing governments and companies to get a better understanding of what the future might hold for human spaceflight. After incorporating multiple a- uh, agentic tools, the adoption of this Luna platform within NASA exploded.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And you can see from the graph here that the curve takes off, and we have about nineteen billion tokens that were used in approximately six weeks, with a peak of one point two seven billion tokens used in one day. So, but to fully embrace technology, we can't just use our own tools, right? We, we're building these tools at JSC, but we continue to experiment with other tools that industry is providing to compare and see what might work best for other purposes.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So for example, we're working with Microsoft right now to demonstrate an AI agent in mission control. So you see the next slide. So there's mission control. For Space Station, we have about a dozen flight controllers who sit in that room and [00:34:00] work together as a coordinated team in a theater-style room.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: The flight controllers sit at their consoles, manage individual systems. They have screens in front of the room that allow them to see crew data, clocks, and other, uh, maybe the map of, of where the spacecraft is in relation to the Earth. The flight controllers are organized into a team with a flight director leading the team.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: You can see in this picture, the flight director is wearing a headset so he can easily communicate with his flight controllers. He may be in the room, in back rooms, and maybe other places around the world. Um, what you don't see is all these folks around the world are in, uh, available to him via, via communication and headset.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So you can imagine a scenario where a flight controller has four people in a back room possibly, all working on subsystems within the major system they're monitoring, and w- but one of those flight controllers is now an AI agent. In this scenario, the fr- front room flight controller can interact with the back room AI flight controller through the headset using natural language, effectively talking with this AI [00:35:00] flight controller in the same manner that they would talk with a human flight controller.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So we're right now working on that prototype for this AI flight controller to see how it might work in this environment. And as a first test, we would demonstrate how the AI technology might increase flight controller responsiveness to off-nominal telemetry. So for example, the AI agent, maybe without prompt, is watching telemetry and announces to the flight controller that a temperature value is exceeding some limit.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: That quicker look at the data, the data allows the flight controller to then take quicker action to go remedy the issue, maybe i-issue a command to the space station, things like that, to change set points. So it's not about replacing the flight controller. It's really about giving them the tools to help manage the growing amount of data that they have to quickly synthesize and act upon for human spaceflight operations.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So what are the risks? Sending humans to space is a complicated task. So even as the technology [00:36:00] advances, the human element will always be at the core of our exploration. AI is a new tool we're picking up, and we have to learn how to operate with it responsibly. It's no secret AI has challenges. We have to worry about pr- data protection, data propagation, data hallucination, data provenance, as I said earlier.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We have to worry about data spillage, keeping the proprietary information protected. We have to worry about AI data deluge. Uh, this would be synthetic data, feedback loops, storage burdens, and all the large volume of data that we're already have and adding to that with AI-generated data. Our mitigation is governance.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: AI can exacerbate problems if your governance is weak. So we have to operate and think about the secure environments using lineage tracking, updating our risk models, and having a life cycle and retention strategies for the data. And most importantly, we have to train our workforce how to use AI [00:37:00] responsibly and actually be skeptical of the answers that it gives.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So we have to remember that AI is a tool that can help us make sense of the data we have, but it can also mislead us. So adding new data to the data pile that is already there. So AI might be a reliable assistant, but reliability does not automatically equal trustworthiness. So why take the risk? So at NASA, we perform work every day that has risk.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: We're sending humans into space, and it's not an easy task. We-- And we know from history what the consequences can be. And it's true that using emerging technology comes with risk. We're introducing something new. We can't know every variable until we've tested it, measured it, and validated the outcomes.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: However, I do believe that AI as a mission capability and not just a productivity tool outweighs the risk of, of attempting to use it. The [00:38:00] example would be looking across all that mission imagery, both scientific and historical, so that we can learn from it for future missions. We're able to process these large volumes of data I've been speaking about in support of our flight controllers making real-time decisions for the human spaceflight missions.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: And we can use the tools to find that small detail that our eyes might have missed when we were preparing for these flight readiness reviews. So NASA's next Moon landing is just around the corner. Our teams in Houston are already working on Artemis III and Artemis IV. And if you thought the Artemis II images were really good, well, j-- I think just wait until we have astronauts on the surface of the Moon, and we're sending back pictures.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So as we apply AI to our processes for managing imagery, we'll be able to get these authentic NASA images out to the public faster and faster. So we're really excited about this, and but it's not without the challenges that I've been talking about today. And this [00:39:00] is, I think, where you all come in. We need industry and government partners to keep working with the technology just like we are, solving problems and challenges with all this emerging technology.
DR. TROY LEBLANC: So we look-- really look forward to working with all of you. Thank you very much.
HOST: If you're passionate about technology and eager to explore more incredible events, make sure to visit actiac.org/upcoming-events. Keep your curiosity sparked and your calendars marked. Until next time, stay inspired and connected