ESA releases Earth Virtual Expert, an AI assistant for Earth observation questions

The European Space Agency has released Earth Virtual Expert (EVE), an AI platform that answers questions on Earth observation and Earth science in plain language. It was built by ESA Φ-lab with Pi School, Mistral and Imperative Space, and is a large language model that summarises, translates and presents technical material.

EVE draws on text sources including ESA, NASA and Copernicus websites and peer-reviewed research supplied through a Wiley collaboration. A retrieval system pulls in recent articles, and an "LLM-as-a-judge" check reviews answers before they reach users.

The platform went live for all interested users on 8 October 2026. The model, code, training datasets and benchmarks are public on Hugging Face and GitHub. A second development phase began in September 2026, adding data retrieval and multi-step tasks. Satellite imagery search is planned for 2027, along with environmental data, weather reports and numerical models. EVE is funded under ESA's FutureEO programme.

Why it matters: An open, citation-grounded assistant lowers the barrier to finding and interpreting Earth observation research, useful for analysts and policymakers without specialist training. Open models and datasets also let others adapt the approach to regional needs.