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Amazon used AWS in satellite testing


Image taken by the ION Elysian Eleonara satellite in January 2022.

orbital DI

by Amazon The cloud division has successfully run a suite of software on a satellite in orbit, in a test “first of its kind,” the company announced Tuesday.

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, conducted a demonstration of the prototype satellite software through a partnership with Italian company D-Orbit and Swedish joint venture Unibap. The experiment has been conducted for the past 10 months in low Earth orbit, using the D-Orbit satellite as a test platform.

The success of the AWS demo has implications throughout the space industry, as spacecraft — meaning anything from space stations to satellites — face bottlenecks in both data storage and communication. lost while in orbit.

“Downlink”, the process of transmitting data from orbit, requires the spacecraft to connect to the ground station, with limitations such as the connection speed or the time window during which the spacecraft is on the ground station.

AWS software automatically reviews images to decide which images are most useful to send to the ground. It also reduces the size of the image by up to 42%.

“We have demonstrated the ability to increase [satellite’s] productivity,” AWS vice president Max Peterson told CNBC.

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Peterson added that the test also shows that AWS can help companies do “satellite insights operations, instead of having to wait until you can link back to Earth.”

“We can train models to recognize practically anything… [giving] the ability to both improve the use of a really expensive asset in space, and to be able to take massive amounts of data, gather insights, and turn it into action faster,” said Peterson.

AWS has steadily built up its Satellite and Aerospace Solutions unit since established in 2020with a company that provides cloud services to many customers and partners in the space sector.

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