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botica Technologies, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Open Cosmos have been honored with the 2025 SpaceNews Icon Award for Space AI Partnership in recognition of their joint work on Dynamic Targeting, a technology that uses artificial intelligence to help spacecraft decide, autonomously and within seconds, where to make science observations from orbit.
The award was presented at the 8th SpaceNews Icon Awards ceremony, held on December 2, 2025, at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., where leading figures from across the global space community gathered to celebrate this year’s honorees.
The award recognizes the team’s efforts to harness artificial intelligence for advancing space operations and capabilities and highlights the strength of the international cooperative effort that has driven this progress through key contributions from teams located in the USA, Ireland, Spain, the UK, and The Netherlands.
SpaceNews Icon Awards
Now in its eighth year, the SpaceNews Icon Awards honor individuals, missions and organizations whose innovation and leadership are shaping the global space industry.
Presented annually by SpaceNews, a leading publication covering the business, policy and technology of space since 1989, the awards spotlight excellence in categories such as Commercial Space, Civil Space, Innovative Technology, Sustainability and Space AI Partnership.
A collaborative breakthrough
The Dynamic Targeting demonstration was developed at JPL in collaboration with Open Cosmos and Ubotica Technologies. The test took place on Hammer, a satellite designed, built and operated by Open Cosmos, and is used for Ubotica’s CogniSAT-6 mission. The satellite’s onboard autonomy payload, featuring a commercially available AI processor, was designed and developed by Ubotica.
Funded by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office and developed at JPL, Dynamic Targeting allows a satellite to autonomously look ahead on its orbital path, analyze imagery captured by the spacecraft’s camera, and decide within seconds where to aim its sensors, capturing the most valuable data.
The technology demonstrates how onboard AI can enable Earth-observing satellites to process and analyze look-ahead imagery in real time to determine and immediately capture the best follow-up image, a process that takes less than 90 seconds without human intervention — fully autonomous.
The first flight test demonstrated Dynamic Targeting’s ability to avoid imaging clouds, a common challenge for Earth-observing spacecraft. By analyzing imagery from a look-ahead view roughly 300 miles (500 kilometers) in front of its path, the spacecraft can distinguish between clouds and clear sky and choose where to capture an image.
This approach yields a higher proportion of usable science data. It enables satellites to be smarter about what they image, so that they are not storing, processing and downlinking imagery that is unusable to scientists.
Aubrey Dunne, Chief Technology Officer at Ubotica, said: “Receiving the SpaceNews Icon Award is a huge honor for the entire team. It reflects years of work developing space-qualifying autonomous systems that enable satellites to see, think and act for themselves. This recognition affirms that artificial intelligence is now becoming a core capability for space missions.”
Steve Chien, Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at JPL, said: “This Dynamic Targeting demonstration is a significant step forward in shifting decision-making from mission controllers on Earth to the spacecraft. The spacecraft can now, on its own, acquire and analyze data in tens of seconds and immediately focus on what is most important. Dynamic Targeting is a powerful tool with the potential to revolutionize space missions — enabling dynamic measurements, avoiding clouds for atmospheric retrieval missions, or tracking plumes at a comet.”
Jordi Barrera Ars, Chief Technology Officer at Open Cosmos, said: “We are immensely proud that the efforts of the team to make satellites more autonomous — being used more efficiently to increase capacity and deliver real-time information — are recognized with this award. At Open Cosmos, our vision has always been to build satellites to understand and connect the world. This technology is a leap forward: By enabling spacecraft to autonomously assess their surroundings and make decisions in real time, we are unlocking a new paradigm for Earth-observation missions. It’s not just about gathering data, but about gathering the right data: smarter, faster and more responsively than ever before.”
What’s next for Dynamic Targeting
With the cloud-avoidance capability now proven, ongoing tests are focusing on identifying and tracking storms, wildfires, volcanic eruptions and other short-lived phenomena. The JPL team is also developing a project called Federated Autonomous Measurement, in which multiple spacecraft could share AI-driven observations to coordinate targeting across a constellation — paving the way for networks of intelligent satellites capable of working together in real time.
