AI agents help steer the search for extraterrestrial signals

Breakthrough Listen and the SETI Institute are bringing agentic AI into daily operations at the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California. From a single natural language request, agents can steer the instrument, calibrate observations, correct incoming data and apply AI models to live signals, making the search for potential extraterrestrial technologies faster and more adaptable.

NVIDIA Holoscan processes incoming sensor streams, while its DAQIRI library moves data directly into GPU memory for analysis rather than filling hard drives. CyberEther, a signal-processing framework developed at the SETI Institute, handles computations using NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries. Nexus, a web-based observatory orchestrator, gives agents access to instrument status, computing resources and processing pipelines. The system can handle 2.4 terabits per second on NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, with inference running on premises beside the instrument.

The pipeline has already achieved the first real-time AI detection of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula. Researchers are now evaluating open models, including NVIDIA Nemotron, for situations where keeping data local and delivering rapid results are priorities. That work could also support future observatories operating offline on the far side of the moon.