Big Blue and the US space agency are open sourcing their latest AI model, named Surya, the Sanskrit word for the Sun. This has been developed to predict the kind of violent solar flare-ups that can send a torrent of charged particles toward the Earth, potentially damaging electronic infrastructure.

"Our society is built on technologies that are highly susceptible to space weather," said NASA's Heliophysics Division Director Joseph Westlake in the release. "Just as we use meteorology to forecast Earth's weather, space weather forecasts predict the conditions and events in the space environment that can affect Earth and our technologies."