Google’s Suncatcher satellite runs Gemma 4 in orbit
Google’s Project Suncatcher prototype satellite completed roughly three weeks of in-orbit commissioning and began communicating with Earth, according to Google and multiple news reports. Ground engineers prompted the preloaded Gemma 4 model to create a space-themed haiku, while the satellite also handled limerick and telemetry prompts. Google said its TPUs can run for only about 20 minutes per session because of power constraints, and it plans further tests under thermal stress and radiation exposure.
The prototype demonstrates an AI inference workload running on an onboard TPU and returning a response from orbit, while also exposing the power and radiation-reliability challenges facing orbital AI computing.
Google Suncatcher’s prototype space data center is online and communicating with the ground after launching earlier this month alongside more than 100 other spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The satellite, which carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, is intended to pave the way for future networks of close-flying satellites performing large inference workloads in orbit. However, the power demands of the TPU mean it can only turn one on for about 20 minutes at a time, complicating the already tricky business of space-to-ground communications.
After a commissioning process that tested out the satellite’s subsystems over about three weeks, the spacecraft was ready to work. When engineers on the ground sent their first prompt this week, they asked the model pre-loaded onto the satellite, Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4, to write a haiku about being in space. And thus:
Blue marble below
Data streams in silent grace
Starlight feeds my core. ✨
Google said it tested the model with these space-themed limericks (they should have sent a poet?) and, perhaps more importantly, the company asked the spacecraft to report on the orbital conditions around the satellite.
#Google#Google DeepMind#Gemma 4#Google TPU#Project Suncatcher#SpaceX#Falcon 9