Making satellites intelligent to avoid useless and costly data traffic and develop more efficient space services: this is the goal achieved by the Italian company D-Orbit together with Amazon Web Services (Aws) who carried out a 10-month experiment in orbit to test methods of analyzing images directly in space.
The experiment was announced at re:Invent, the event dedicated to the new frontiers of the cloud taking place in Las Vegas until December 2nd, destined to have important repercussions for the use of spatial data.
Space is a privileged observation point for studying the planet and the data arriving from the instruments in orbit offer a lot of useful information for services of all kinds.
In recent years there has been an incredible reduction in the costs of space missions, starting from the costs of launches to that of instruments, but a great impact is still due to data transmission: each image collected must in fact be transmitted to Earth through specific networks whose operating costs are still very high.
For this reason, one of the great challenges is to be able to optimize the volume of data to be transferred to Earth, i.e. make satellites intelligent by developing an internal data processing capability and sending only the most relevant ones.
“Using AWS software to perform real-time data analysis aboard an orbiting satellite and delivering that analysis directly to decision makers via the cloud represents a definitive change in existing approaches to space data management ”, commented Max Peterson, vice president of AWS.
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