Amazon’s cloud computing division successfully ran a software suite on a satellite in orbit, in a “first-of-its-kind” experiment, the company announced Tuesday.
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, conducted the prototype satellite software demonstration through partnerships with Italian company D-Orbit and Swedish venture Unibap. The experiment was conducted over the past 10 months in low Earth orbit, using a D-Orbit satellite as the test platform.
The success of the AWS demo has implications across the space industry, as spacecraft – meaning anything from space stations to satellites – face a bottleneck in both data storage and communications while in orbit.
KEY POINTS
- Amazon's cloud computing division successfully ran a software suite on a satellite in orbit, the company announced Tuesday.
- AWS, or Amazon Web Services, used prototype software on a satellite to analyze imagery.
- The software automatically reviewed images to decide which were the most useful to send back down to the ground, and also reduced the size of images.
News coverage:
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/11/30/aws_powers_earth_observation_satellite/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/amazon-aws-experiment-satellite-orbit.html
Amazon Web Services just declared an on-orbit “first” for its 2.5-year-old Aerospace & Satellites division. The cloud computing powerhouse, best known as AWS, announced Tuesday that it had run machine learning software on board an orbiting satellite. Working with D-Orbit and Unibap, AWS machine learning processed EO imagery aboard the spacecraft, sifting the signal from the noise. In theory, this orbital “edge” computing can save precious resources, rather than just downlinking everything to the ground.
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